IMPRESSIONS 
AND    EXPERIENCES 


BY 
W.     D.     HO'WELLS 


HARPER    &    BROTHERS    PUBLISHERS 

NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 

1909 


Urav  library  UC  Santo  Cror  1986 


BOOKS  OP  TRAVEL  AND  COMMENT  BY 
WILLIAM   DEAN    HOWELLS 

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Copyright,  1896,  by  W.  D.  HOWELLS. 

All  rights  reserved. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

THE  COUNTRY  PRINTER •  3 

POLICE  REPORT 35 

I  TALK  OF  DREAMS 70 

AN  EAST-SIDE  RAMBLE 94 

TRIBULATIONS  OF  A  CHEERFUL  GIVER Ill 

THE  CLOSING  OF  THE  HOTEL 140 

GLIMPSES  OF  CENTRAL  PARK 166 

NEW  YORK  STREETS 181 


IMPRESSIONS   AND    EXPERIENCES 


IMPRESSIONS  AND    EXPERIENCES 


THE    COUNTRY   PRINTER 

MY  earliest  memories,  or  ttose  which  I  can  make 
sure  are  not  the  sort  of  early  hearsay  that  we  mistake 
for  remembrance  later  in  life,  concern  a  country  news- 
paper, or,  rather,  a  country  printing-office.  The  office 
was  in  my  childish  consciousness  some  years  before 
the  paper  was;  the  compositors  rhythmically  swaying 
before  their  cases  of  type;  the  pressman  flinging  him- 
self back  on  the  bar  that  made  the  impression,  with  a 
swirl  of  his  long  hair ;  the  apprentice  rolling  the  forms, 
and  the  foreman  bending  over  the  imposing-stone  were 
familiar  to  me  when  I  could  not  grasp  the  notion  of 
any  effect  from  their  labors.  In  due  time  I  came  to 
know  all  about  it,  and  to  understand  that  these  activi- 
ties went  to  the  making  of  the  Whig  newspaper  which 
my  father  edited  to  the  confusion  of  the  Locofocos,  and 
in  the  especial  interest  of  Henry  Clay;  I  myself  sup- 
ported this  leader  so  vigorously  for  the  presidency  in 
my  seventh  year  that  it  was  long  before  I  could  realize 
that  the  election  of  1844  had  resulted  in  his  defeat. 
My  father  had  already  been  a  printer  for  a  good  many 
years,  and  sometime  in  the  early  thirties  he  had  led 
a  literary  forlorn-hope,  in  a  West-Virginian  town,  with 
a  monthly  magazine,  which  he  printed  himself  and 

edited  with  the  help  of  his  sister. 

3 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

As  long  as  lie  remained  in  business  he  remained  a 
country  editor  and  a  country  printer ;  he  began  to  study 
medicine  when  he  was  a  young  man,  but  he  abandoned 
it  for  the  calling  of  his  life  without  regret,  and,  though 
with  his  speculative  and  inventive  temperament  he  was 
tempted  to  experiment  in  other  things,  I  do  not  think 
he  would  ever  have  lastingly  forsaken  his  newspaper 
for  them.  In  fact,  the  art  of  printing  was  in  our 
blood;  it  never  brought  us  great  honor  or  profit;  and 
we  were  always  planning  and  dreaming  to  get  out  of 
it,  or  get  it  out  of  us ;  but  we  are  all  in  some  sort  bound 
up  with  it  still.  To  me  it  is  now  so  endeared  by  the 
associations  of  childhood  that  I  cannot  breathe  the  fa- 
miliar odor  of  types  and  presses  without  emotion ;  and 
I  should  not  be  surprised  if  I  found  myself  trying  to 
cast  a  halo  of  romance  about  the  old-fashioned  country 
office  in  what  I  shall  have  to  say  of  it  here. 


Our  first  newspaper  was  published  in  southwestern 
Ohio,  but  after  a  series  of  varying  fortunes,  which  I 
need  not  dwell  upon,  we  found  ourselves  in  possession 
of  an  office  in  the  northeastern  corner  of  the  state, 
where  the  prevalent  political  feeling  promised  a  pros- 
perity to  one  of  my  father's  antislavery  opinions  which 
he  had  never  yet  enjoyed.  He  had  no  money,  but  in 
those  days  it  was  an  easy  matter  to  get  an  interest  in 
a  country  paper  on  credit,  and  we  all  went  gladly  to 
work  to  help  him  pay  for  the  share  that  he  acquired 
in  one  by  this  means.  An  office  which  gave  a  fair 
enough  living,  as  living  was  then,  could  be  bought  for 
twelve  or  fifteen  hundred  dollars;  but  this  was  an  un- 
commonly good  office,  and  I  suppose  the  half  of  it  which 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

my  father  took  was  worth  one  sum  or  the  other.  After- 
ward, within  a  few  months,  when  it  was  arranged  to 
remove  the  paper  from  the  village  where  it  had  always 
been  published  to  the  county-seat,  a  sort  of  joint-stock 
company  was  formed,  and  the  value  of  his  moiety  in- 
creased so  much,  nominally  at  least,  that  he  was  nearly  , 
ten  years  paying  for  it.  By  this  time  I  was  long  out 
of  the  story,  but  at  the  beginning  I  was  very  vividly  in 
it,  and  before  the  world  began  to  call  me  with  that 
voice  which  the  heart  of  youth  cannot  resist,  it  was  very 
interesting;  I  felt  its  charm  then,  and  now,  as  I  turn 
back  to  it,  I  feel  its  charm  again,  though  it  was  al- 
ways a  story  of  steady  work,  if  not  hard  work. 

The  county-seat,  where  it  had  been  judged  best  to 
transfer  the  paper  lest  some  other  paper  of  like  poli- 
tics should  be  established  there,  was  a  village  of  only 
six  or  seven  hundred  inhabitants.  But,  as  the  United 
States  senator  who  was  one  of  its  citizens  used  to  say, 
it  was  "  a  place  of  great  political  privileges."  The 
dauntless  man  who  represented  the  district  in  the 
House  for  twenty  years,  and  who  had  fought  the 
antislavery  battle  from  the  first,  was  his  fellow-vil- 
lager and  more  than  compeer  in  distinction;  and,  be- 
sides these,  there  was  nearly  always  a  state  senator 
or  representative  among  us.  The  county  officers,  of 
course,  lived  at  the  county-seat,  and  the  leading  law- 
yers, who  were  the  leading  politicians,  made  their 
homes  in  the  shadow  of  the  court-house,  where  one  of 
them  was  presently  elected  to  preside  as  judge  of  the 
common  pleas.  In  politics,  the  county  was  always 
overwhelmingly  Freesoil,  as  the  forerunner  of  the  Re- 
publican party  was  then  called ;  the  Whigs  had  hardly 
gathered  themselves  together  since  the  defeat  of  Gen- 
eral Scott  for  the  presidency;  the  Democrats,  though 
dominant  in  state  and  nation,  and  faithful  to  slavery 

5 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

at  every  election,  did  not  greatly  outnumber  among  us 
the  zealots  called  Comeouters,  who  would  not  vote  at 
all  under  a  Constitution  recognizing  the  right  of  men 
to  own  men.  Our  paper  was  Freesoil,  and  its  field 
was  large  among  that  vast  majority  of  the  people  who 
believed  that  slavery  would  finally  perish  if  kept  out 
of  the  territories  and  confined  to  the  old  Slave  States. 
With  the  removal  of  the  press  to  the  county-seat  there 
was  a  hope  that  this  field  could  be  widened  till  every 
Free-soil  voter  became  a  subscriber.  It  did  not  fall  out 
so;  even  of  those  who  subscribed  in  the  ardor  of  their 
political  sympathies,  many  never  paid ;  but  our  list  was 
nevertheless  handsomely  increased,  and  numbered  fif- 
teen or  sixteen  hundred.  I  do  not  know  how  it  may  be 
now,  but  then  most  country  papers  had  a  list  of  four 
or  five  hundred  subscribers;  a  few  had  a  thousand,  a 
very  few  twelve  hundred,  and  these  were  fairly  deci- 
mated by  delinquents.  We  were  so  flown  with  hope 
that  I  remember  there  was  serious  talk  of  risking  the 
loss  of  the  delinquents  on  our  list  by  exacting  payment 
in  advance;  but  the  measure  was  thought  too  bold, 
and  we  compromised  by  demanding  two  dollars  a  year 
for  the  paper,  and  taking  a  dollar  and  a  half  if  paid  in 
advance.  Twenty-five  years  later  my  brother,  who  had 
followed  my  father  in  the  business,  discovered  that  a 
man  who  never  meant  to  pay  for  his  paper  would  as 
lief  owe  two  dollars  as  any  less  sum,  and  he  at  last 
risked  the  loss  of  the  delinquents  by  requiring  advance 
payment ;  it  was  an  heroic  venture,  but  it  was  perhaps 
time  to  make  it. 

The  people  of  the  county  were  mostly  farmers,  and 
of  these  nearly  all  were  dairymen.  The  few  manufact- 
ures were  on  a  small  scale,  except  perhaps  the  making 
of  oars,  which  were  shipped  all  over  the  world  from 
the  heart  of  the  primeval  forests  densely  wooding  the 

6 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

vast  levels  of  the  region.  The  portable  steam  -  saw- 
mills dropped  down  on  the  borders  of  the  woods  have 
long  since  eaten  their  way  through  and  through  them, 
and  devoured  every  stick  of  timber  in  most  places,  and 
drunk  up  the  water-courses  that  the  woods  once  kept 
full;  but  at  that  time  half  the  land  was  in  the  shadow 
of  those  mighty  poplars  and  hickories,  elms  and  chest- 
nuts, ashes  and  hemlocks;  and  the  meadows  that  past- 
ured the  herds  of  red  cattle  were  dotted  with  stumps 
as  thick  as  harvest  stubble.  Now  there  are  not  even 
stumps;  the  woods  are  gone,  and  the  water-courses  are 
torrents  in  spring  and  beds  of  dry  clay  in  summer. 
The  meadows  themselves  have  vanished,  for  it  has  been 
found  that  the  strong  yellow  soil  will  produce  more 
in  grain  than  in  milk.  There  is  more  money  in  the 
hands  of  the  farmers  there,  though  there  is  still  so 
little  that  by  any  city  scale  it  would  seem  comically 
little,  pathetically  little ;  but  forty  years  ago  there  was 
so  much  less  that  fifty  dollars  seldom  passed  through 
a  farmer's  hands  in  a  year.  Payment  was  made  in 
kind  rather  than  in  coin,  and  every  sort  of  farm  pro- 
duce was  legal  tender  at  the  printing-office.  Wood  was 
welcome  in  any  quantity,  for  the  huge  box-stove  con- 
sumed it  with  inappeasable  voracity,  and  then  did  not 
heat  the  wide,  low  room  which  was  at  once  editorial- 
room,  composing-room,  and  press-room.  Perhaps  this 
was  not  so  much  the  fault  of  the  stove  as  of  the  build- 
ing. In  that  cold,  lake-shore  country  the  people  dwelt 
in  wooden  structures  almost  as  thin  and  flimsy  as  tents ; 
and  often  in  the  first  winter  of  our  sojourn  the  type 
froze  solid  with  the  water  which  the  compositor  put 
on  it  when  he  wished  to  distribute  his  case ;  the  inking- 
rollers  had  to  be  thawed  before  they  could  be  used  on 
the  press;  and,  if  the  current  of  the  editor's  soul  had 
not  been  the  most  genial  that  ever  flowed  in  this  rough 

7 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

world,  it  must  have  been  congealed  at  its  source.  The 
cases  of  type  had  to  be  placed  very  near  the  windows 
so  as  to  get  all  the  light  there  was,  and  they  got  all  the 
cold  there  was,  too.  From  time  to  time  the  compos- 
itor's fingers  became  so  stiff  that  blowing  on  them 
would  not  avail;  he  passed  the  time  in  excursions  be- 
tween his  stand  and  the  stove;  in  very  cold  weather 
he  practised  the  device  of  warming  his  whole  case  of 
types  by  the  fire,  and,  when  it  lost  heat,  warming  it 
again.  The  man  at  the  press-wheel  was  then  the  envi- 
able man ;  those  who  handled  the  chill,  damp  sheets  of 
paper  were  no  more  fortunate  than  the  compositors. 


II 


The  first  floor  of  our  office-building  was  used  by  a 
sash-and-blind  factory ;  there  was  a  machine-shop  some- 
where in  it,  and  a  mill  for  sawing  out  shingles ;  and  it 
was  better  fitted  to  the  exercise  of  these  robust  in- 
dustries than  to  the  requirements  of  our  more  deli- 
cate craft.  Later,  we  had  a  more  comfortable  place, 
in  a  new  wooden  "business  block,"  and  for  several 
years  before  I  left  it  the  office  was  domiciled  in  an 
old  dwelling-house,  which  we  bought,  and  which  we 
used  without  much  change.  It  could  never  have  been 
a  very  luxurious  dwelling,  and  my  associations  with  it 
are  of  a  wintry  cold,  scarcely  less  polar  than  that  we 
were  inured  to  elsewhere.  In  fact,  the  climate  of  that 
region  is  rough  and  fierce;  and  the  lake  winds  have  a 
malice  sharper  than  the  saltest  gales  of  the  North 
Shore  of  Massachusetts.  I  know  that  there  were  love- 
ly summers  and  lovelier  autumns  in  my  time  there, 
full  of  sunsets  of  a  strange,  wild,  melancholy  splen- 
dor, I  suppose  from  some  atmospheric  influence  of  the 

8 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

lake ;  but  I  think  chiefly  of  the  winters,  so  awful  to  us 
after  the  mild  seasons  of  southern  Ohio;  the  frosts  of 
ten  and  twenty  below ;  the  village  streets  and  the  coun- 
try roads  drowned  in  snow,  the  consumptives  in  the 
thin  houses,  and  the  "slippin',"  as  the  sleighing  was 
called,  that  lasted  from  December  to  April  with  hardly 
a  break.  At  first  our  family  was  housed  on  a  farm 
a  little  way  out,  because  there  was  no  tenement  to  be 
had  in  the  village,  and  my  father  and  I  used  to  walk 
to  and  from  the  office  together  in  the  morning  and 
evening.  I  had  taught  myself  to  read  Spanish,  in  my 
passion  for  Don  Quixote,  and  I  was  then,  at  the  age 
of  fifteen,  preparing  to  write  a  life  of  Cervantes.  This 
scheme  occupied  me  a  good  deal  in  those  bleak  walks, 
and  perhaps  it  was  because  my  head  was  so  hot  with  it 
that  my  feet  were  always  very  cold;  but  my  father 
assured  me  that  they  would  get  warm  as  soon  as  my 
boots  froze.  If  I  have  never  yet  written  that  life  of 
Cervantes,  on  the  other  hand  I  have  never  been  quite 
able  to  make  it  clear  to  myself  why  my  feet  should 
have  got  warm  when  my  boots  froze. 


Ill 

It  may  have  been  only  a  theory  of  his ;  it  may  have 
been  a  joke.  He  had  a  great  many  theories  and  a 
great  many  jokes,  and  together  these  always  kept  life 
interesting  and  sunshiny  to  him.  With  his  serene 
temperament  and  his  happy  doubt  of  disaster  in  any 
form,  he  was  singularly  well  fitted  to  encounter  the 
hardships  of  a  country  editor's  lot.  But  for  the  mo- 
ment, and  for  what  now  seems  a  long  time  after  the 
removal  of  our  paper  to  the  county-seat,  these  seem  to 
have  vanished.  The  printing-office  was  the  centre  of 

9 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

civic  and  social  interest;  it  was  frequented  by  visitors 
at  all  times,  and  on  publication  day  it  was  a  scene  of 
gayety  that  looks  a  little  incredible  in  the  retrospect. 
The  place  was  as  bare  and  rude  as  a  printing-office 
seems  always  to  be:  the  walls  were  splotched  with  ink 
and  the  floor  littered  with  refuse  newspapers ;  but  lured 
by  the  novelty  of  the  affair,  and  perhaps  attracted  by  a 
natural  curiosity  to  see  what  manner  of  strange  men 
the  printers  were,  the  school-girls  and  young  ladies  of 
the  village  flocked  in  and  made  it  like  a  scene  of  comic 
opera,  with  their  pretty  dresses  and  faces,  their  eager 
chatter  and  lively  energy  in  folding  the  papers  and 
addressing  them  to  the  subscribers,  while  our  fellow- 
citizens  of  the  place,  like  the  bassos  and  barytones  and 
tenors  of  the  chorus,  stood  about  and  looked  on  with 
faintly  sarcastic  faces.  It  would  not  do  to  think  now 
of  what  sorrow  life  and  death  have  since  wrought  for 
all  those  happy  young  creatures,  but  I  may  recall  with- 
out too  much  pathos  the  sensation  when  some  citizen 
volunteer  relaxed  from  his  gravity  far  enough  to  re- 
lieve the  regular  mercenary  at  the  crank  of  our  huge 
power  -  press  wheel,  amid  the  applause  of  the  whole 
company. 

We  were  very  vain  of  that  press,  which  replaced 
the  hand-press  hitherto  employed  in  printing  the  paper. 
This  was  of  the  style  and  make  of  the  hand-press  which 
superseded  the  Ramage  press  of  Franklin's  time;  but 
it  had  been  decided  to  signalize  our  new  departure  by 
the  purchase  of  a  power-press  of  modern  contrivance 
and  of  a  speed  fitted  to  meet  the  demands  of  a  sub- 
scription-list which  might  be  indefinitely  extended.  A 
deputation  of  the  leading  politicians  accompanied  the 
editor  to  ^N"ew  York,  where  he  went  to  choose  the  ma- 
chine, and  where  he  bought  a  second-hand  Adams  press 

of  the  earliest  pattern  and  patent.     I  do  not  know,  or 

10 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

at  this  date  I  would  not  undertake  to  say,  just  what 
principle  governed  his  selection  of  this  superannuated 
veteran;  it  seems  not  to  have  been  very  cheap;  but 
possibly  he  had  a  prescience  of  the  disabilities  which 
were  to  task  his  ingenuity  to  the  very  last  days  of  that 
press.  Certainly  no  man  of  less  gift  and  skill  could 
have  coped  with  its  infirmities,  and  I  am  sure  that  he 
thoroughly  enjoyed  nursing  it  into  such  activity  as 
carried  it  hysterically  through  those  far-off  publica- 
tion days.  It  had  obscure  functional  disorders  of 
various  kinds,  so  that  it  would  from  time  to  time 
cease  to  act,  and  would  have  to  be  doctored  by  the 
hour  before  it  would  go  on.  There  was  probably  some 
organic  trouble,  too,  for,  though  it  did  not  really  fall 
to  pieces  on  our  hands,  it  showed  itself  incapable  of 
profiting  by  several  improvements  which  he  invented, 
and  could,  no  doubt,  have  successfully  applied  to  the 
press  if  its  constitution  had  not  been  undermined.  It 
went  with  a  crank  set  in  a  prodigious  fly-wheel  which 
revolved  at  a  great  rate,  till  it  came  to  the  moment  of 
making  the  impression,  when  the  whole  mechanism  was 
seized  with  such  a  reluctance  as  nothing  but  an  heroic 
effort  at  the  crank  could  overcome.  It  finally  made 
so  great  a  draught  upon  our  forces  that  it  was  decided 
to  substitute  steam  for  muscle  in  its  operation,  and  we 
got  a  small  engine  which  could  fully  sympathize  with 
the  press  in  having  seen  better  days.  I  do  not  know 
that  there  was  anything  the  matter  with  the  engine 
itself,  but  the  boiler  had  some  peculiarities  which  might 
well  mystify  the  casual  spectator.  He  could  easily  have 
satisfied  himself  that  there  was  no  danger  of  its  blow- 
ing up  when  he  saw  my  brother  feeding  bran  or  corn- 
meal  into  its  safety-valve  in  order  to  fill  up  certain 
seams  or  fissures  in  it  which  caused  it  to  give  out  at 

the  moments  of  the  greatest  reluctance  in  the  press. 

11 


IMPEESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

But  still  he  must  have  had  his  misgivings  of  latent 
danger  of  some  other  kind,  though  nothing  ever  act- 
ually happened  of  a  hurtful  character.  To  this  day 
I  do  not  know  just  where  those  seams  or  fissures  were, 
but  I  think  they  were  in  the  boiler-head,  and  that  it 
was  therefore  suffering  from  a  kind  of  chronic  fracture 
of  the  skull.  What  is  certain  is  that,  somehow,  the 
engine  and  the  press  did  always  get  us  through  publica- 
tion day,  and  not  only  with  safety,  but  often  with 
credit;  so  that  not  long  ago,  when  I  was  at  home,  and 
my  brother  and  I  were  looking  over  an  old  file  of  his 
paper,  we  found  it  much  better  printed  than  either  of 
us  expected;  as  well  printed,  in  fact,  as  if  it  had  been 
done  on  an  old  hand-press,  instead  of  the  steam-power 
press  which  it  vaunted  the  use  of.  The  wonder  was 
that,  under  all  the  disadvantages,  the  paper  was  ever 
printed  on  our  steam  power-press  at  all;  it  was  little 
short  of  miraculous  that  it  was  legibly  printed,  and 
altogether  unaccountable  that  such  impressions  as  we 
found  in  that  file  could  come  from  it.  Of  course,  they 
were  not  average  impressions;  they  were  the  very  best 
out  of  the  whole  edition,  and  were  as  creditable  as  the 
editorial  make-up  of  the  sheet. 


IV 


On  the  first  page  was  a  poem,  which  I  suppose  I 
must  have  selected,  and  then  a  story,  filling  all  the 
rest  of  the  page,  which  my  brother  more  probably 
chose;  for  he  had  a  decided  fancy  in  fiction,  and  had 
a  scrap-book  of  inexhaustible  riches,  which  he  could 
draw  upon  indefinitely  for  old  personal  or  family  fa- 
vorites. The  next  page  was  filled  with  selections  of 
various  kinds,  and  with  original  matter  interesting  to 

12 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

farmers.  Then  came  a  page  of  advertisements,  and 
then  the  editorial  page,  where  my  father  had  given  his 
opinions  of  the  political  questions  which  interested 
him,  and  which  he  thought  it  the  duty  of  the  country 
press  to  discuss,  with  sometimes  essays  in  the  field  of 
religion  and  morals.  There  was  a  letter  of  two  col- 
umns from  Washington,  contributed  every  week  by  the 
congressman  who  represented  our  district;  and  there 
was  a  letter  from  New  York,  written  by  a  young  lady 
of  the  county  who  was  studying  art  under  a  master 
of  portraiture  then  flourishing  in  the  metropolis — if 
that  is  not  stating  it  too  largely  for  the  renown  of 
Thomas  Hicks,  as  we  see  it  in  a  vanishing  perspective. 
The  rest  of  this  page,  as  well  as  the  greater  part  of  the 
next,  was  filled  with  general  news  clipped  from  the 
daily  papers  and  partly  condensed  from  them.  There 
was  also  such  local  intelligence  as  offered  itself,  and 
communications  on  the  affairs  of  village  and  county; 
but  the  editor  did  not  welcome  tidings  of  new  barns 
and  abnormal  vegetation,  or  flatter  hens  to  lay  eggs 
of  unusual  size  or  with  unusual  frequency  by  undue 
public  notice.  All  that  order  of  minute  neighborhood 
gossip  which  now  makes  the  country  paper  a  sort  of 
open  letter  was  then  unknown.  He  published  mar- 
riages and  deaths,  and  such  obituary  notices  as  the 
sorrowing  fondness  of  friends  prompted  them  to  send 
him;  and  he  introduced  the  custom  of  publishing 
births,  after  the  English  fashion,  which  the  people 
took  to  kindly. 

We  had  an  ambition,  even  so  remotely  as  that  day, 
in  the  direction  of  the  illustration  which  has  since  so 
flourished  in  the  newspapers.  Till  then  we  had  never 
gone  further  in  the  art  than  to  print  a  jubilant  raccoon 
over  the  news  of  some  Whig  victory,  or,  what  was  to 
the  same  purpose,  an  inverted  cockerel  in  mockery  of 

13 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

the  beaten  Democrats;  but  now  we  rose  to  the  notion 
of  illustrated  journalism.  We  published  a  story  with 
a  woodcut  in  it,  and  we  watched  to  see  how  that  cut 
came  out  all  through  the  edition  with  a  pride  that  was 
perhaps  too  exhaustive;  at  any  rate,  we  never  tried 
another. 

Of  course,  much  of  the  political  writing  in  the  pa- 
per was  controversial,  and  was  carried  on  with  editors 
of  other  opinions  elsewhere  in  the  county,  for  we  had 
no  rival  in  our  own  village.  In  this,  which  has  always 
been  the  vice  of  American  journalism,  the  country 
press  was  then  fully  as  provincial  as  the  great  metro- 
politan journals  are  now.  These  may  be  more  pitiless- 
ly personal  in  the  conduct  of  their  political  discussions, 
and  a  little  more  skilled  in  obloquy  and  insult;  but 
the  bickering  went  on  in  the  country  papers  quite  as 
idly  and  foolishly.  I  fancy  nobody  really  cared  for 
our  quarrels,  and  that  those  who  followed  them  were 
disgusted  when  they  were  more  than  merely  wearied. 

The  space  given  to  them  might  better  have  been 
given  even  to  original  poetry.  This  was  sometimes 
accepted,  but  was  not  invited;  though  our  sixth  page 
commonly  began  with  verse  of  some  kind.  Then  came 
more  prose  selections,  but  never  at  any  time  accounts 
of  murder  or  violent  crimes,  which  the  editor  abomi- 
nated in  themselves  and  believed  thoroughly  corrupting. 
Advertisements  of  various  kinds  filled  out  the  sheet, 
which  was  simple  and  quiet  in  typography,  wholly 
without  the  hand-bill  display  which  now  renders  near- 
ly all  newspapers  repulsive  to  the  eye.  I  am  rather 
proud,  in  my  quality  of  printer,  that  this  was  the 
style  which  I  established ;  and  we  maintained  it  against 
all  advertisers,  who  then  as  now  wished  to  outshriek 
one  another  in  large  type  and  ugly  woodcuts. 

It  was  by  no  means  easy  to  hold  a  firm  hand  with 

14 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

the  "  live  business  men "  of  our  village  and  county, 
who  came  out  twice  a  year  with  the  spring  and  fall 
announcements  of  their  fresh  stocks  of  goods,  which 
they  had  personally  visited  New  York  to  lay  in;  but 
one  of  the  moral  advantages  of  an  enterprise  so  modest 
as  ours  was  that  the  counting-room  and  the  editorial- 
room  were  united  under  the  same  head,  and  this  head 
was  the  editor's.  After  all,  I  think  we  lost  nothing 
by  the  bold  stand  we  made  in  behalf  of  good  taste, 
and,  at  any  rate,  we  risked  it  when  we  had  not  the 
courage  to  cut  off  our  delinquent  subscribers. 

We  had  business  advertising  from  all  the  villages 
in  the  county,  for  the  paper  had  a  large  circle  of  read- 
ers in  each,  and  a  certain  authority,  in  virtue  of  repre- 
senting the  county  -  seat.  But  a  great  deal  of  our 
advertising  was  of  patent  medicines,  as  the  advertising 
still  is  in  the  country  papers.  It  was  very  profitable, 
and  so  was  the  legal  advertising,  when  we  could  get 
the  money  for  it.  The  money  had  to  come  by  order 
of  court,  and  about  half  the  time  the  order  of  court 
failed  to  include  the  costs  of  advertising.  Then  we 
did  not  get  it,  and  we  never  got  it,  though  we  were 
always  glad  to  get  the  legal  advertising  on  the  chance 
of  getting  the  pay.  It  was  not  official,  but  was  made 
up  of  the  lawyers'  notices  to  defendants  of  the  suits 
brought  against  them.  If  it  had  all  been  paid  for,  I 
am  not  sure  that  we  should  now  be  in  a  position  to 
complain  of  the  ingratitude  of  the  working-classes,  or 
prepared  to  discuss,  from  a  vantage  of  personal  ex- 
perience, the  duty  of  vast  wealth  to  the  community; 
but  still  we  should  have  been  better  off  for  that  money, 
as  well  as  the  money  we  lost  by  a  large  and  loyal  list 
of  delinquent  subscribers.  From  time  to  time  there 
were  stirring  appeals  to  these  adherents  in  the  editorial 

columns,  which  did  not  stir  them,  and  again  the  most 

15 


IMPKESSIONS    AND    EXPEKIENCES 

flattering  offers  to  take  any  kind  of  produce  in  pay- 
ment of  subscription.  Sometimes  my  brother  boldly 
tracked  the  delinquents  to  their  lairs.  In  most  cases 
I  fancy  they  escaped  whatever  arts  he  used  to  take 
them;  many  died  peacefully  in  their  beds  afterward, 
and  their  debts  follow  them  to  this  day.  Still,  he  must 
now  and  then  have  got  money  from  them,  and  I  am 
sure  he  did  get  different  kinds  of  "  trade."  Once,  I 
remember,  he  brought  back  in  the  tail  of  his  wagon 
a  young  pig,  a  pig  so  very  young  that  my  father  pro- 
nounced it  "  merely  an  organization."  Whether  it 
had  been  wrought  to  frenzy  or  not  by  the  strange 
experiences  of  its  journey  I  cannot  say,  but  as  soon 
as  it  was  set  down  on  the  ground  it  began  to  run 
madly,  and  it  kept  on  running  till  it  fell  down  and 
perished  miserably.  It  had  been  taken  for  a  year's 
subscription,  and  it  was  quite  as  if  we  had  lost  a  de- 
linquent subscriber. 


Upon  the  whole,  our  paper  was  an  attempt  at  con- 
scientious and  self-respecting  journalism;  it  addressed 
itself  seriously  to  the  minds  of  its  readers;  it  sought 
to  form  their  tastes  and  opinions.  I  do  not  know  how 
much  it  influenced  them,  if  it  influenced  them  at  all, 
and  as  to  any  effect  beyond  the  circle  of  its  subscribers, 
that  cannot  be  imagined,  even  in  a  fond  retrospect. 
But  since  no  good  effort  is  altogether  lost,  I  am  sure 
that  this  endeavor  must  have  had  some  tacit  effect; 
and  I  am  sure  that  no  one  got  harm  from  a  sincerity 
of  conviction  that  devoted  itself  to  the  highest  interest 
of  the  reader,  that  appealed  to  nothing  base,  and  flat- 
tered nothing  foolish  in  him.  It  went  from  our  home 

to  the  homes  of  the  people  in  a  very  literal  sense,  for 

16 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

my  father  usually  brought  his  exchanges  from  the  of- 
fice at  the  end  of  his  day  there,  and  made  his  selections 
or  wrote  his  editorials  while  the  household  work  went 
on  around  him,  and  his  children  gathered  about  the 
same  lamp,  with  their  books  or  their  jokes;  there  were 
apt  to  be  a  good  many  of  both. 

Our  county  was  the  most  characteristic  of  that  re- 
markable group  of  counties  in  northern  Ohio  called 
the  Western  Reserve,  and  forty  years  ago  the  popula- 
tion was  almost  purely  New  England  in  origin,  either 
by  direct  settlement  from  Connecticut,  or  indirectly 
after  the  sojourn  of  a  generation  in  New  York  State. 
We  were  ourselves  from  southern  Ohio,  where  the  life 
was  then  strongly  tinged  by  the  adjoining  life  of  Ken- 
tucky and  Virginia,  and  we  found  these  transplanted 
Yankees  cold  and  blunt  in  their  manners;  but  we  did 
not  undervalue  their  virtues.  They  formed  in  that 
day  a  leaven  of  right  thinking  and  feeling  which  was 
to  leaven  the  whole  lump  of  the  otherwise  proslavery 
or  indifferent  state;  and  I  suppose  that  outside  of  the 
antislavery  circles  of  Boston  there  was  nowhere  in  the 
country  a  population  so  resolute  and  so  intelligent  in 
its  political  opinions.  They  were  very  radical  in  every 
way,  and  hospitable  to  novelty  of  all  kinds.  I  imagine 
that  they  tested  more  new  religions  and  new  patents 
than  have  been  even  heard  of  in  less  inquiring  com- 
munities. When  we  came  among  them  they  had  lately 
been  swept  by  the  fires  of  spiritualism,  which  left  be- 
hind a  great  deal  of  smoke  and  ashes  where  the  in- 
herited New  England  orthodoxy  had  been.  A  belief 
in  the  saving  efficacy  of  spirit  phenomena  still  exists 
among  them,  but  not,  I  fancy,  at  all  in  the  former 
measure,  when  nearly  every  household  had  its  medium, 
and  the  tables  that  tipped  outnumbered  the  tables  that 
did  not  tip.  The  old  New  York  Tribune,  which  was 

17 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

circulated  in  the  country  almost  as  widely  as  our  own 
paper,  had  deeply  schooled  the  people  in  the  economics 
of  Horace  Greeley,  and  they  were  ready  for  any  sort  of 
millennium,  religious  or  industrial,  that  should  ar- 
rive, while  they  looked  very  wisely  after  the  main 
chance  in  the  mean  time.  They  were  temperate,  hard- 
working, hard-thinking  folks,  who  dwelt  on  their  scat- 
tered farms,  and  came  up  to  the  county  fair  once  a 
year,  when  they  were  apt  to  visit  the  printing-office 
and  pay  for  their  papers.  In  spite  of  the  English 
superstition  to  the  contrary,  the  average  American  is 
not  very  curious,  if  one  may  judge  from  his  reticence 
in  the  presence  of  things  strange  enough  to  excite 
question;  and  if  our  craft  surprised  these  witnesses 
they  rarely  confessed  it. 

They  thought  it  droll,  as  people  of  the  simpler  oc- 
cupations are  apt  to  think  all  the  more  complex  arts; 
and  one  of  them  once  went  so  far  in  expression  of  his 
humorous  conception  as  to  say,  after  a  long  stare  at 
one  of  the  compositors  dodging  and  pecking  at  the 
type  in  his  case,  "  Like  an  old  hen  pickin'  up  millet." 
This  sort  of  silence,  and  this  sort  of  comment,  both 
exasperated  the  printers,  who  took  their  revenge  as 
they  could.  They  fed  it  full,  once,  when  a  country 
subscriber's  horse,  tied  before  the  office,  crossed  his 
hind-legs  and  sat  down  in  his  harness  like  a  tired 
man,  and  they  proposed  to  go  out  and  offer  him  a 
chair,  to  take  him  a  glass  of  water,  and  ask  him  to 
come  inside.  But  fate  did  not  often  give  them  such 
innings;  they  mostly  had  to  create  their  chances  of 
reprisal,  but  they  did  not  mind  that. 

There  was  always  a  good  deal  of  talk  going  on,  but, 
although  we  were  very  ardent  politicians,  the  talk  was 
not  political.  When  it  was  not  mere  banter,  it  was 
mostly  literary;  we  disputed  about  authors  among 

18 


THE    COUNTKY    PBINTEK 

ourselves  and  with  the  village  wits  who  dropped  in. 
There  were  several  of  these  who  were  readers,  and 
they  liked  to  stand  with  their  hacks  to  our  stove  and 
challenge  opinion  concerning  Holmes  and  Poe,  Irving 
and  Macaulay,  Pope  and  Byron,  Dickens  and  Shake- 
speare. 

It  was  Shakespeare  who  was  of tenest  on  our  tongues ; 
indeed,  the  printing-office  of  former  days  had  so  much 
affinity  with  the  theatre  that  compositors  and  comedians 
were  easily  convertible;  and  I  have  seen  our  printers 
engaged  in  hand-to-hand  combats  with  column-rules, 
two  up  and  two  down,  quite  like  the  real  houts  on 
the  stage.  Religion  entered  a  good  deal  into  our  dis- 
cussions, which  my  father,  the  most  tolerant  of  men, 
would  not  suffer  to  become  irreverent,  even  on  the  lips 
of  law  students  bathing  themselves  in  the  fiery  spirit 
of  Tom  Paine.  He  was  willing  to  meet  any  one  in 
debate  of  moral,  religious,  or  political  questions,  and 
the  wildest  -  haired  Comeouters,  the  most  ruthless 
sceptic,  the  most  credulous  spiritualist,  found  him 
ready  to  take  them  seriously,  even  when  it  was  hard 
not  to  take  them  in  joke. 

It  was  part  of  his  duty,  as  publisher  of  the  paper, 
to  bear  patiently  with  another  kind  of  frequenter — the 
type  of  farmer  who  thought  he  wished  to  discontinue 
his  paper,  and  really  wished  to  be  talked  into  continu- 
ing it.  I  think  he  rather  enjoyed  letting  the  subscriber 
talk  himself  out,  and  carrying  him  from  point  to  point 
in  his  argument,  always  consenting  that  he  knew  best 
what  he  wanted  to  do,  but  skilfully  persuading  him 
at  last  that  a  home-paper  was  more  suited  to  his  needs 
than  any  city  substitute.  Once  I  could  have  given  the 
heads  of  his  reasoning,  but  they  are  gone  from  me 
now.  The  editor  was  especially  interested  in  the  farm- 
ing of  the  region,  and  I  think  it  was  partly  owing  to 
3  19 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

the  attention  he  called  to  the  question  that  its  charac- 
ter was  so  largely  changed.  It  is  still  a  dairy  country, 
but  now  it  exports  grain,  and  formerly  the  farmers  had 
to  buy  their  flour. 

He  did  not  neglect  any  real  local  interest  in  his 
purpose  of  keeping  his  readers  alive  to  matters  of 
more  general  importance,  but  he  was  fortunate  in  ad- 
dressing himself  to  people  who  cared  for  the  larger,  if 
remoter,  themes  he  loved.  In  fact,  as  long  as  slavery 
remained  a  question  in  our  politics,  they  had  a  seri- 
ousness and  dignity  which  the  present  generation  can 
hardly  imagine ;  and  men  of  all  callings  felt  themselves 
uplifted  by  the  appeal  this  question  made  to  their  rea- 
son and  conscience.  My  father  constantly  taught  in 
his  paper  that  if  slavery  could  be  kept  out  of  the  ter- 
ritories it  would  perish,  and,  as  I  have  said,  this  was 
the  belief  of  the  vast  majority  of  his  readers.  They 
were  more  or  less  fervid  in  it,  according  to  their  per- 
sonal temperaments ;  some  of  them  were  fierce  in  their 
convictions  and  some  humorous,  but  they  were  all  in 
earnest.  The  editor  sympathized  more  with  those  who 
took  the  true  faith  gayly.  All  were  agreed  that  the 
Fugitive  -  slave  Law  was  to  be  violated  at  any  risk ; 
it  would  not  have  been  possible  to  take  an  escaping 
slave  out  of  that  county  without  bloodshed,  but  the 
people  would  have  enjoyed  outwitting  his  captors  more 
than  destroying  them.  Even  in  the  great  John  Brown 
times,  when  it  was  known  that  there  was  a  deposit  of 
his  impracticable  pikes  somewhere  in  our  woods,  and 
he  and  his  followers  came  and  went  among  us  on  some 
mysterious  business  of  insurrectionary  aim,  the  affair 
had  its  droll  aspects  which  none  appreciated  more 
keenly  than  the  Quaker-born  editor.  With  his  cheer- 
ful scepticism,  he  could  never  have  believed  that  any 

harm  or  danger  would  come  of  it  all;  and  I  think  he 

20 


THE    CGUNTKY    PRINTER 

would  have  been  hardly  surprised  to  wake  up  any 
morning  and  find  that  slavery  had  died  suddenly  dur- 
ing the  night  of  its  own  iniquity. 

He  was  like  all  country  editors  then,  and  I  dare  say 
now,  in  being  a  printer  as  well  as  an  editor,  and  he 
took  a  full  share  in  the  mechanical  labors.  These  were 
formerly  much  more  burdensome,  for  twice  or  thrice 
the  present  type-setting  was  then  done  in  the  country 
offices.  At  the  present  day  the  country  printer  buys 
of  a  city  agency  his  paper  already  printed  on  one  side, 
and  he  gets  it  for  the  cost*  of  the  blank  paper,  the 
agency  finding  its  account  in  the  advertisements  it  puts 
in.  Besides  this  patent  inside,  as  it  is  called,  the 
printer  buys  stereotyped  selections  of  other  agencies, 
which  offer  him  almost  as  wide  a  range  of  matter  as 
the  exchange  newspapers  he  used  to  choose  from.  The 
few  columns  left  for  local  gossip  and  general  news, 
and  for  whatever  editorial  comment  he  cares  to  make 
on  passing  events,  can  be  easily  filled  up  by  two  com- 
positors. But  in  my  time  we  had  three  journeymen 
at  work  and  two  or  three  girl-compositors,  and  com- 
monly a  boy-apprentice  besides.  The  paper  was  richer 
in  a  personal  quality,  and  the  printing-office  was  un- 
questionably more  of  a  school.  After  we  began  to 
take  girl-apprentices  it  became  coeducative,  as  far  as 
they  cared  to  profit  by  it;  but  I  think  it  did  not  serve 
to  widen  their  thoughts  or  quicken  their  wits  as  it  did 
those  of  the  men.  They  looked  to  their  craft  as  a 
living,  not  as  a  life,  and  they  had  no  pride  in  it.  They 
did  not  learn  the  whole  trade,  as  the  journeymen  had 
done,  and  served  only  such  apprenticeship  as  fitted 
them  to  set  type.  They  were  then  paid  by  the  thou- 
sand ems,  and  their  earnings  were  usually  as  great  at 
the  end  of  a  month  as  at  the  end  of  a  year.  But  the 

boy  who  came  up  from  his  father's  farm,  with  the 

21 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

wish  to  be  a  printer  because  Franklin  had  been  one, 
and  with  the  intent  of  making  the  office  his  university, 
began  by  sweeping  it  out,  by  hewing  wood  and  carry- 
ing water  for  it.  He  became  a  roller-boy,  and  served 
long  behind  the  press  before  he  was  promoted  to  the 
case,  where  he  learned  slowly  and  painfully  to  set 
type.  His  wage  was  forty  dollars  a  year  and  two  suits 
of  clothes,  for  three  years,  when  his  apprenticeship 
ended,  and  his  wander-years  (too  often  literally)  be- 
gan. He  was  glad  of  being  inky  and  stained  with  the 
marks  of  his  trade ;  he  wore  a  four  -  cornered  paper 
cap,  in  the  earlier  stages  of  his  service,  and  even  an 
apron.  When  he  became  a  journeyman,  he  clothed 
himself  in  black  doeskin  and  broadcloth,  and  put  on  a 
silk  hat  and  the  thinnest-soled  fine  boots  that  could 
be  found,  and  comported  himself  as  much  like  a  man 
of  the  world  as  he  knew  how  to  do.  His  work  brought 
him  acquainted  with  a  vast  variety  of  interests,  and 
kept  his  mind  as  well  as  hands  employed ;  he  could  not 
help  thinking  about  them,  and  he  did  not  fail  to  talk 
about  them.  His  comments  had  generally  a  slightly 
acid  flavor,  and  his  constant  survey  of  the  world,  in  the 
"  map  of  busy  life  "  always  under  his  eye,  bred  in  him 
the  contempt  of  familiarity.  He  was  none  the  less 
agreeable  for  that,  and  the  jokes  that  flew  about  from 
case  to  case  in  our  office  were  something  the  editor 
would  have  been  the  last  man  to  interfere  with.  He 
read  or  wrote  on  through  them  all,  and  now  and  then 
turned  from  his  papers  to  join  in  them. 


VI 

THe  journeyman  of  that  time  and  place  was  much 
better  than  the  printer  whom  we  had  known  earlier 

22 


THE    COUNTKY    PRINTER 

and  in  a  more  lax  civilization,  who  was  too  apt  to  be 
sober  only  when  he  had  not  the  means  to  be  other- 
wise, and  who  arrived  out  of  the  unknown  with  noth- 
ing in  his  pocket,  and  departed  into  it  with  only  money 
enough  to  carry  him  to  the  next  printing-office.  If  we 
had  no  work  for  him  it  was  the  custom  to  take  up  a 
collection  in  the  office,  and  he  accepted  it  as  a  usage 
of  the  craft,  without  loss  of  self-respect.  It  could  hap- 
pen that  his  often  infirmity  would  overtake  him  before 
he  got  out  of  town,  but  in  this  case  he  did  not  return 
for  a  second  collection ;  I  suppose  that  would  not  have 
been  good  form.  Now  and  then  a  printer  of  this  ear- 
lier sort  appeared  among  us  for  a  little  time,  but  the 
air  of  the  Western  Reserve  was  somehow  unfriendly 
to  him,  and  he  soon  left  us  for  the  kindlier  clime  of 
the  Ohio  River,  or  for  the  more  southerly  region  which 
we  were  ourselves  sometimes  so  homesick  for,  and  which 
his  soft,  rolling  accent  so  pleasantly  reminded  us  of. 
Still,  there  was  something  about  the  business — perhaps 
the  arsenic  in  the  type-metal — which  everywhere  af- 
fected the  morals  as  it  was  said  sometimes  to  affect  the 
nerves. 

There  was  one  of  our  printers  who  was  a  capital 
compositor,  a  most  engaging  companion,  and  of  unim- 
peachable Western  Reserve  lineage,  who  would  work 
along  in  apparently  perpetuity  on  the  line  of  duty,  and 
then  suddenly  deflect  from  it.  If  he  wanted  a  day  off, 
or  several  days,  he  would  take  the  time,  without  no- 
tice, and  with  a  princely  indifference  to  any  exigency 
we  might  be  in.  He  came  back  when  he  chose  and 
offered  to  go  to  work  again,  and  I  do  not  remember 
that  he  was  ever  refused.  He  was  never  in  drink;  his 
behavior  was  the  effect  of  some  obscure  principle  of 
conduct,  unless  it  was  that  moral  contagion  from  the 
material  he  wrought  in. 

23 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

I  do  not  know  that  he  was  any  more  characteristic, 
though,  than  another  printer  of  ours,  who  was  dear  to 
my  soul  from  the  quaintness  of  his  humor  arid  his  love 
of  literature.  I  think  he  was,  upon  the  whole,  the 
most  original  spirit  I  have  known,  and  it  was  not  the 
least  part  of  his  originality  that  he  was  then  aiming  to 
become  a  professor  in  some  college,  and  was  diligently 
training  himself  for  the  calling  in  all  the  leisure  he 
could  get  from  his  work.  The  usual  thing  would  have 
been  to  read  laAV  and  crowd  forward  in  political  life, 
but  my  friend  despised  this  common  ideal.  We  were 
both  studying  Latin,  he  quite  by  himself,  as  he  studied 
Greek  and  German,  and  I  with  such  help  as  I  could 
find  in  reciting  to  a  kindly  old  minister,  who  had  for- 
gotten most  of  his  own  Latin,  and  whom  I  do  not  now 
wish  to  blame  for  falling  asleep  over  the  lessons  in  my 
presence;  I  did  not  know  them  well  enough  to  keep 
him  up  to  the  work.  My  friend  and  I  read  the  lan- 
guage, he  more  and  I  less,  and  we  tried  to  speak  it 
together,  to  give  ourselves  consequence,  and  to  have 
the  pleasure  of  saying  before  some  people's  faces  what 
we  should  otherwise  have  said  behind  their  backs;  I 
should  not  now  undertake  to  speak  Latin  to  achieve 
either  of  these  aims.  Besides  this,  we  read  a  great 
deal  together,  mainly  Shakespeare  and  Cervantes.  I 
had  a  task  of  a  certain  number  of  thousand  ems  a  day, 
and  when  I  had  finished  that  I  was  free  to  do  what  I 
liked;  he  would  stop  work  at  the  same  time,  and  then 
we  would  take  our  Don  Quixote  into  some  clean,  sweet 
beech-woods  there  were  near  the  village,  and  laugh  our 
hearts  out  over  it.  I  can  see  my  friend's  strange  face 
now,  very  regular,  very  fine,  and  smooth  as  a  girl's, 
with  quaint  blue  eyes,  shut  long,  long  ago,  to  this  dolce 
lome;  and  some  day  I  should  like  to  tell  all  about  him ; 
but  this  is  not  the  place.  When  the  war  broke  out  he 

24 


THE    COUNTKY    PEINTEK 

left  the  position  he  had  got  by  that  time  in  some  col- 
lege or  academy  farther  west  and  went  into  the  army. 
One  morning,  in  Louisiana,  he  was  killed  by  a  guerilla 
who  got  a  shot  at  him  when  he  was  a  little  way  from 
his  company,  and  who  was  probably  proud  of  picking 
off  the  Yankee  captain.  But  as  yet  such  a  fate  was 
unimaginable.  He  was  the  first  friend  of  my  youth; 
he  was  older  than  I  by  five  or  six  years;  but  we  met 
in  an  equality  of  ambition  and  purpose,  though  he  was 
rather  more  inclined  to  the  severity  of  the  scholar's 
ideal,  and  I  hoped  to  slip,  through  somehow  with  a 
mere  literary  use  of  my  learning. 


VII 


As  I  have  tried  to  say,  the  printers  of  that  day  had 
nearly  all  some  affinity  with  literature,  if  not  some 
love  of  it ;  it  was  in  a  sort  always  at  their  fingers-ends, 
and  they  must  have  got  some  touch  of  it  whether  they 
would  or  not.  They  thought  their  trade  a  poor  one 
moneywise,  but  they  were  fond  of  it  and  they  did  not 
often  forsake  it.  Their  hope  was  somehow  to  get  hold 
of  a  country  paper  and  become  editors  and  publishers; 
and  my  friend  and  I,  when  he  was  twenty-four  and  I 
eighteen,  once  crossed  over  into  Pennsylvania,  where 
we  had  heard  there  was  a  paper  for  sale;  but  we  had 
not  the  courage  to  offer  even  promises  to  pay  for  it. 
The  craft  had  a  repute  for  insolvency  which  it  merited, 
and  it  was  at  odds  with  the  community  at  large  by 
reason  of  something  not  immediately  intelligible  in  it, 
or  at  least  not  classifiable.  I  remember  that  when  I 
began  to  write  a  certain  story  of  mine,  I  told  Mark 
Twain,  who  was  once  a  printer,  that  I  was  going  to 

make  the  hero  a  printer,  and  he  said :  "  Better  not. 

25 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

People  will  not  understand  him.  Printing  is  some- 
thing every  village  has  in  it,  but  it  is  always  a  sort  of 
mystery,  and  the  reader  does  not  like  to  be  perplexed 
by  something  that  he  thinks  he  knows  about."  This 
seemed  very  acute  and  just,  though  I  made  my  hero 
a  printer  all  the  same,  and  I  offer  it  to  the  public  as  a 
light  on  the  anomalous  relation  the  country  printer 
bears  to  his  fellow-citizens.  They  see  him  following 
his  strange  calling  among  them,  but  to  neither  wealth 
nor  worship,  and  they  cannot  understand  why  he  does 
not  take  up  something  else,  something  respectable  and 
remunerative;  they  feel  that  there  must  be  something 
weak,  something  wrong  in  a  man  who  is  willing  to 
wear  his  life  out  in  a  vocation  which  keeps  him  poor 
and  dependent  on  the  favor  they  grudge  him.  It  is 
like  the  relation  which  all  the  arts  bear  to  the  world, 
and  which  is  peculiarly  thankless  in  a  purely  commer- 
cial civilization  like  ours;  though  I  cannot  pretend 
that  printing  is  an  art  in  the  highest  sense.  I  have 
heard  old  journeymen  claim  that  it  was  a  profession 
and  ought  to  rank  with  the  learned  professions,  but  I 
am  afraid  that  was  from  too  fond  a  pride  in  it.  It  is 
in  one  sort  a  handicraft,  like  any  other,  like  carpenter- 
ing or  stone-cutting;  but  it  has  its  artistic  delight,  as 
every  handicraft  has.  There  is  the  ideal  in  all  work; 
and  I  have  had  moments  of  unsurpassed  gladness  in 
feeling  that  I  had  come  very  near  the  ideal  in  what  I 
had  done  in  my  trade.  This  joy  is  the  right  of  every 
worker,  and  in  so  far  as  modern  methods  have  taken 
it  from  him  they  have  wronged  him.  I  can  under- 
stand Ruskin  in  his  wish  to  restore  it  to  some  of  the 
handicrafts  which  have  lost  it  in  the  "  base  mechani- 
cal "  operations  of  the  great  manufactories,  where  men 
spend  their  lives  in  making  one  thing,  or  a  part  of  a 

thing,  and  cannot  follow  their  work  constructively.    If 

26 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

that  were  to  be  the  end,  the  operative  would  forever 
lose  the  delight  in  work  which  is  the  best  thing  in  the 
world.  But  I  hope  this  is  not  to  be  the  end,  and  that 
when  people  like  again  to  make  things  for  use  and  not 
merely  for  profit  the  workman  will  have  again  the  re- 
ward that  is  more  than  wages. 

I  know  that  in  the  old-fashioned  country  printing- 
office  we  had  this,  and  we  enjoyed  our  trade  as  the 
decorative  art  it  also  is.  Questions  of  taste  constantly 
arose  in  the  arrangement  of  a  title-page,  the  display 
of  a  placard  or  a  hand-bill,  the  use  of  this  type  or  that. 
They  did  not  go  far,  these  questions,  but  they  employed 
the  critical  faculty  and  the  aesthetic  instinct,  and  they 
allied  us,  however  slightly  and  unconsciously,  with  the 
creators  of  the  beautiful. 

But  now,  it  must  be  confessed,  printing  has  shared 
the  fate  of  all  other  handicrafts.  Thanks  to  united 
labor,  it  is  better  paid  in  each  of  its  subdivisions  than 
it  once  was  as  a  whole.  In  my  time,  the  hire  of  a 
first-rate  country  printer,  who  usually  worked  by  the 
week,  was  a  dollar  a  day;  but  of  course  this  was  not 
so  little  in  1852  as  it  would  be  in  1892.  My  childish 
remembrance  is  of  the  journeymen  working  two  hours 
after  supper,  every  night,  so  as  to  make  out  a  day  of 
twelve  hours;  but  at  the  time  I  write  of  the  day  of 
ten  hours  was  the  law  and  the  rule,  and  nobody  worked 
longer,  except  when  the  President's  Message  was  to  be 
put  in  type,  or  on  some  other  august  occasion. 

The  pay  is  not  only  increased  in  proportion  to  the 
cost  of  living,  but  it  is  really  greater,  and  the  condi- 
tions are  all  very  much  better.  But  I  believe  no  ap- 
prentice now  learns  the  whole  trade,  and  each  of  our 
printers,  forty  years  ago,  would  have  known  how  to 
do  everything  in  the  kind  of  office  he  hoped  to  own. 
He  would  have  had  to  make  a  good  many  things  which 

27 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

the  printer  now  buys,  and  first  among  them  the  rollers 
which  are  used  for  inking  the  type  on  the  press.  These 
were  of  a  composition  of  glue  and  molasses,  and  were 
of  an  india-rubbery  elasticity  and  consistency,  as  long 
as  they  were  in  good  condition.  But  with  use  and  time 
they  became  hard,  the  ink  smeared  on  them,  and  they 
failed  to  impart  it  evenly  to  the  type ;  they  had  to  be 
thrown  away  or  melted  over  again.  This  was  done  on 
the  office  stove,  in  a  large  bucket  which  they  were  cut 
up  into,  with  fresh  glue  and  molasses  added.  It  seems 
in  the  retrospect  to  have  been  rather  a  simple  affair, 
and  I  do  not  now  see  why  casting  a  roller  should  have 
involved  so  much  absolute  failure  and  rarely  have 
given  a  satisfactory  result.  The  mould  was  a  large 
copper  cylinder,  and  the  wooden  core  of  the  roller 
was  fixed  in  place  by  an  iron  cap  and  foot-piece.  The 
mixture  boiled  away,  as  it  now  seems  to  me,  for  days, 
and  far  into  the  sleepy  nights,  when  as  a  child  I  was 
proud  of  sitting  up  with  it  very  late.  Then  at  some 
weird  hour  my  father  or  my  brother  poured  it  into 
the  mould,  and  we  went  home  and  left  the  rest  with 
fate.  The  next  morning  the  whole  office  crowded  round 
to  see  the  roller  drawn  from  the  mould,  and  it  usually 
came  out  with  such  long  hollows  and  gaps  in  its  sides 
that  it  had  to  be  cut  up  at  once  and  melted  over  again. 
At  present,  all  rollers  are  bought  somewhere  in  'New 
York  or  Chicago,  I  believe,  and  a  printer  would  no 
more  think  of  making  a  roller  than  of  making  any 
other  part  of  his  press.  "  And  you  know,"  said  my 
brother,  who  told  me  of  this  change,  "  we  don't  wet  the 
paper  now."  "  Good  Heavens,"  said  I,  "  you  don't 
print  it  dry!"  "Yes,  and  it  doesn't  blur  any  more 
than  if  it  were  wet."  I  suppose  wetting  the  paper 
was  a  usage  that  antedated  the  invention  of  movable 
type.  It  used  to  be  drawn,  quire  by  quire,  through  a 

28 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

vat  of  clear  water,  and  then  the  night  before  publica- 
tion day  it  was  turned  and  sprinkled.  Now  it  was 
printed  dry,  I  felt  as  if  it  were  time  to  class  Benjamin 
Franklin  with  the  sun-myths. 


VIII 

Publication  day  was  always  a  time  of  great  excite- 
ment. We  were  busy  all  the  morning  getting  the  last 
editorials  and  the  latest  news  in  type,  and  when  the 
paper  went  to  press  in  the  afternoon  the  entire  force 
was  drafted  to  the  work  of  helping  the  engine  and  the 
press  through  their  various  disabilities  and  reluctances. 
Several  hands  were  needed  to  run  the  press,  even  when 
it  was  in  a  willing  frame;  others  folded  the  papers 
as  they  came  from  it;  as  many  more  were  called 
from  their  wonted  work  to  address  them  to  the  sub- 
scribers, for  with  the  well-known  fickleness  of  their 
sex,  the  young  ladies  of  the  village  ceased  to  do  this 
as  soon  as  the  novelty  of  the  affair  wore  off.  Still, 
the  office  was  always  rather  a  lively  scene,  for  the 
paper  was  not  delivered  at  the  village  houses,  and  each 
subscriber  came  and  got  his  copy;  the  villagers  began 
to  come  about  the  hour  we  went  to  press,  the  neigh- 
boring farmers  called  next  day  and  throughout  the 
week.  Nearly  everybody  who  witnessed  the  throes  of 
our  machinery  had  advice  or  sympathy  to  offer,  and 
in  a  place  where  many  people  were  of  a  mechanical 
turn  the  spectacular  failure  of  the  editor's  additions 
and  improvements  was  naturally  a  source  of  public 
entertainment;  perhaps  others  got  as  much  pleasure 
out  of  his  inventions  as  he  did. 

Of  course,  about  election-time  the  excitement  was 

intensified;  we  had  no  railroad  or  telegraphic  commu- 

29 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

nication  with  the  outer  world,  but  it  was  felt  that  we 
somehow  had  the  news,  and  it  was  known  that  we  had 
the  latest  papers  from  Cleveland,  and  that  our  sheet 
would  report  the  intelligence  from  them.  After  all, 
however,  there  was  nothing  very  burning  or  seething 
in  the  eagerness  of  our  subscribers.  They  could  wait; 
their  knowledge  of  the  event  would  not  change  it,  or 
add  or  take  away  one  vote  either  way.  I  dare  say  it 
is  not  so  very  different  now,  when  the  railroad  and  the 
telegraph  have  made  the  little  place  simultaneous  with 
JSTew  York  and  London.  We  people  who  fret  our  lives 
out  in  cities  do  not  know  how  tranquil  life  in  the 
country  still  is.  We  talk  of  the  whirl  and  rush,  as 
if  it  went  on  everywhere,  but  if  you  will  leave  the 
express  train  anywhere  and  pass  five  miles  into  the 
country,  away  from  the  great  through  lines,  you  will 
not  find  the  whirl  and  rush.  People  sometimes  go 
mad  there  from  the  dulness  and  ennui,  as  in  the  cities 
they  sometimes  go  mad  from  the  stress  and  the  strug- 
gle; and  the  problem  of  equalizing  conditions  has  no 
phase  more  interesting  than  that  of  getting  the  good 
of  the  city  and  the  country  out  of  the  one  into  the 
other.  The  old-fashioned  country  newspaper  formed 
almost  the  sole  intellectual  experience  of  the  remote 
and  quiet  folks  who  dwelt  in  their  lonely  farmsteads 
on  the  borders  of  the  woods,  with  few  neighbors  and 
infrequent  visits  to  the  township  centre,  where  the 
church,  a  store  or  two,  and  a  tavern  constituted  a  vil- 
lage. They  got  it  out  of  the  post-office  there  once  a 
week,  and  read  it  in  the  scanty  leisure  left  them  by 
their  farm-work  or  their  household  drudgery,  and  I 
dare  say  they  found  it  interesting.  There  were  some 
men  in  every  neighborhood,  tongueyer  than  the  rest, 
who,  when  they  called  on  us,  seemed  to  have  got  it  by 
heart,  and  who  were  ready  to  defend  or  combat  its 

30 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

positions  with  all  comers;  this  sort  usually  took  some 
other  paper,  too — an  agricultural  paper,  or  the  New 
York  Trybune,  as  they  called  it,  or  a  weekly  edition 
of  a  Cleveland  journal.  It  was  generally  believed  that 
Horace  Greeley  wrote  everything  in  the  Trybune,  and 
when  a  country  subscriber  unfolded  his  Trybune  he 
said,  with  comfortable  expectation,  "  Well,  let's  see 
what  old  Horace  says  this  week."  But  by  far  the 
greater  number  of  our  subscribers  took  no  paper  but 
our  own.  I  do  not  know  whether  there  is  much  more 
reading  done  now  on  the  farms,  but  I  doubt  it.  In 
the  villages,  however,  the  circulation  of  the  nearest 
city  dailies  is  pretty  general,  and  there  is  a  large  sale 
of  the  Sunday  editions.  I  am  not  sure  that  this  is  an 
advantage,  but  in  the  undeniable  decay  of  interest  in 
the  local  preaching,  some  sort  of  mental  relish  for  the 
only  day  of  leisure  is  necessary.  It  is  not  so  much  a 
pity  that  they  read  the  Sunday  papers,  as  that  the 
Sunday  papers  are  so  bad.  If  they  were  carefully  and 
conscientiously  made  up,  they  would  be  of  great  use; 
they  wait  their  reformer,  and  they  do  not  seem  im- 
patient for  him. 

In  the  old  time,  we  printers  were  rather  more  in 
touch  with  the  world  outside  on  the  journalistic  lines 
than  most  of  our  fellow  -  villagers,  but  otherwise  we 
were  as  remote  as  any  of  them,  and  the  weekly  issue 
of  the  paper  had  not  often  anything  tumultuously  ex- 
citing for  us.  The  greatest  event  of  our  year  was  the 
publication  of  the  President's  Message,  which  was  a 
thrill  in  my  childish  life  long  before  I  had  any  con- 
ception of  its  meaning.  I  fancy  that  the  patent  inside, 
now  so  universally  used  by  the  country  papers,  orig- 
inated in  the  custom  which  the  printers  within  easy 
reach  of  a  large  city  had  of  supplying  themselves  with 

an  edition  of  the  President's  Message,  to  be  folded 

31 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

into  their  own  sheet,  when  they  did  not  print  their 
outside  on  the  back  of  it.  There  was  always  a  hot 
rivalry  between  the  local  papers  in  getting  out  the 
message,  whether  it  was  bought  ready  printed,  or 
whether  it  was  set  up  in  the  office  and  printed  in 
the  body  of  the  paper.  We  had  no  local  rival,  but 
all  the  same  we  made  haste  when  it  was  a  question  of 
the  message.  The  printers  filled  their  cases  with  type, 
ready  for  the  early  copy  of  the  message,  which  the 
editor  used  every  device  to  secure;  when  it  was  once 
in  hand  they  worked  day  and  night  till  it  was  all  up, 
and  then  the  paper  was  put  to  press  at  once,  without 
regard  to  the  usual  publication  day;  and  the  commu- 
nity was  as  nearly  electrified  as  could  be  with  our 
journalistic  enterprise,  which  was  more  important  in 
our  eyes  than  the  matters  the  message  treated  of. 

There  is  no  longer  the  eager  popular  expectation  of 
the  President's  Message  that  there  once  seemed  to  be; 
and  I  think  it  is  something  of  a  loss,  that  ebb  of  the 
high  tide  of  political  feeling  which  began  with  the  era 
of  our  immense  material  prosperity.  It  was  a  feeling 
that  formed  a  solidarity  of  all  the  citizens,  and  if  it 
was  not  always,  or  often,  the  highest  interest  which 
can  unite  men,  it  was  at  least  not  that  deadly  and  self- 
ish cult  of  business  which  centres  each  of  us  in  his 
own  affairs  and  kills  even  our  curiosity  about  others. 
Very  likely  people  were  less  bent  on  the  pursuit  of 
wealth  in  those  days,  because  there  was  less  chance 
to  grow  rich,  but  the  fact  remains  that  they  were  less 
bent  in  that  direction,  and  that  they  gave  their  minds 
to  other  things  more  than  they  do  now.  I  think  those 
other  things  were  larger  things,  and  that  our  civic 
type  was  once  nobler  than  it  is.  It  was  before  the 
period  of  corruption,  when  it  was  not  yet  fully  known 

that  dollars  can  do  the  work  of  votes,  when  the  votes 

32 


THE    COUNTRY    PRINTER 

as  yet  rather  outnumbered  the  dollars,  and  more  of 
us  had  the  one  than  the  other.  The  great  statesman, 
not  the  great  millionaire,  was  then  the  American  ideal, 
and  all  about  in  the  villages  and  on  the  farms  the  peo- 
ple were  eager  to  know  what  the  President  had  said 
to  Congress.  They  are  not  eager  to  know  now,  and 
that  seems  rather  a  pity.  Is  it  because  in  the  war 
which  destroyed  slavery,  the  American  Democracy 
died,  and  by  operation  of  the  same  fatal  anomaly 
the  American  Plutocracy,  which  Lincoln  foreboded, 
was  born;  and  the  people  instinctively  feel  that  they 
have  no  longer  the  old  interest  in  President  or  Con- 
gress ? 

There  are  those  that  say  so,  and,  whether  they  are 
right  or  not,  it  is  certain  that  into  the  great  centres 
where  money  is  heaped  up  the  life  of  the  country  is 
drained,  and  the  country  press  has  suffered  with  the 
other  local  interests.  The  railroads  penetrate  every- 
where, and  carry  the  city  papers  seven  times  a  week, 
where  the  home  paper  pays  its  tardy  visit  once,  with 
a  patent  inside  imported  from  the  nearest  money  cen- 
tre, and  its  few  columns  of  neighborhood  gossip,  too 
inconsiderable  to  be  gathered  up  by  the  correspondents 
of  the  invasive  dailies.  Other  causes  have  worked 
against  the  country  press.  In  counties  where  there 
were  once  two  or  three  papers  there  are  now  eight  or 
ten,  without  a  material  increase  of  population  to  draw 
upon  for  support.  The  county  printing,  which  the 
paper  of  the  dominant  party  could  reckon  upon,  is 
now  shared  with  other  papers  of  the  same  politics,  and 
the  amateur  printing-offices  belonging  to  ingenious  boys 
in  every  neighborhood  get  much  of  the  small  job-work 
which  once  came  to  the  publisher. 

It  is  useless  to  quarrel  with  the  course  of  events,  for 
which  no  one  is  more  to  blame  than  another,  though 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

human  nature  loves  a  scape-goat,  and  from  time  to  time 
we  load  up  some  individual  with  the  common  sins  and 
drive  him  into  a  wilderness  where  he  seems  rather  to 
enjoy  himself  than  otherwise.  I  suppose  that  even  if 
the  conditions  had  continued  favorable,  the  country 
press  could  never  have  become  the  influence  which  our 
editor  fondly  hoped  and  earnestly  strove  to  make  it. 
Like  all  of  us  who  work  at  all,  the  country  printer  had 
to  work  too  hard;  and  he  had  little  time  to  think  or 
to  tell  how  to  make  life  better  and  truer  in  any  sort. 
His  paper  had  once  perhaps  as  much  influence  as  the 
country  pulpit;  its  support  was  certainly  of  the  same 
scanty  and  reluctant  sort,  and  it  was  without  conse- 
cration by  an  avowed  self-devotion.  He  was  concerned 
with  the  main  chance  first,  and  after  that  there  was 
often  no  other  chance,  or  he  lost  sight  of  it.  I  should 
not  instance  him  as  an  exemplary  man,  and  I  should  be 
very  far  from  idealizing  him ;  I  should  not  like  even  to 
undertake  the  task  of  idealizing  a  city  journalist;  and 
yet,  in  the  retrospect  at  least,  the  country  printer  has 
his  pathos  for  me — the  pathos  of  a  man  who  began  to 
follow  a  thankless  calling  because  he  loved  it,  and  kept 
on  at  it  because  he  loved  it,  or  else  because  its  service 
had  warped  and  cramped  him  out  of  form  to  follow  any 
other. 


POLICE   KEPOKT 

ONE  day  in  summer,  when  people  whom  I  had  been 
urging  to  behave  in  some  degree  like  human  beings 
persisted  in  acting  rather  more  like  the  poor  creatures 
who  pass  for  men  and  women  in  most  stage-plays,  I 
shut  my  manuscript  in  a  drawer,  and  the  next  morning 
took  an  early  train  into  the  city.  I  do  not  remember 
just  what  whim  it  was  that  led  me  to  visit  the  police 
court:  perhaps  I  went  because  it  was  in  the  dead  vast 
and  middle  of  the  summer,  and  the  town  afforded  lit- 
tle other  amusement;  perhaps  it  was  because,  in  my 
revolt  against  unreality,  I  was  in  the  humor  to  see  life 
whose  reality  asserts  itself  every  day  in  the  newspapers 
with  indisputable  force.  If  this  was  so,  I  was  fated 
to  a  measure  of  disappointment,  for  when  the  court 
opened  this  reality  often  appeared  no  more  substantial 
than  the  fiction  with  which  I  had  lost  my  patience  at 
home.  But  I  am  bound  to  say  that  it  was  much  more 
entertaining,  and  that  it  was,  so  to  speak,  much  more 
artistically  treated.  It  resolved  itself  into  melodrama, 
or  romantic  tragedy,  having  a  prevailing  comic  inter- 
est, with  moments  of  intensity,  and  with  effects  so 
thrilling  that  I  came  away  with  a  sense  of  the  highest 
theatrical  illusion. 


The  police  court  in  Boston  is  an  upper  room  of  the 
temple  of  justice,  and  is  a  large,  square,  dismal-com- 
4  35 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

plexioned  chamber,  with  the  usual  seams  and  cracks 
configuring  its  walls  and  ceilings;  its  high,  curtainless 
windows  were  long  glares  of  sunless  light,  crossed  with 
the  fine  drizzle  of  an  easterly  rain  on  the  morning  of 
my  visit.  About  one-third  of  the  floor  is  allotted  to 
spectators,  and  supplied  with  benches  of  penitential 
severity;  the  remaining  space  is  occupied  by  a  series 
of  curved  tables  set  in  a  horseshoe,  and  by  a  raised 
platform,  railed  off  from  the  auditorium,  as  I  may  call 
it,  and  supporting  in  successive  gradations  the  clerk's 
desk,  on  a  very  long,  narrow  table,  and  the  judge's 
table  and  easy-chair.  At  either  end  of  the  table  on 
which  the  clerk's  desk  was  placed  was  a  bar,  repre- 
senting in  one  case  the  witness-stand,  and  in  the  other 
the  prisoner's  box;  midway,  the  clerk  stood  within  a 
screen  of  open  iron-work,  hemmed  in  with  books  of 
record  and  tin  boxes  full  of  docketed  papers. 

Outside  of  the  railing  were  the  desks  of  two  officers 
of  the  court,  whose  proper  titles  my  unfamiliarity  with 
the  place  disables  me  from  giving.  They  were  both 
well  in  flesh,  as  I  remember,  and  in  spite  of  their  blue 
flannel  suits  and  the  exercise  of  a  wise  discretion,  by 
which  one  of  them  had  discarded  his  waistcoat  and 
neckcloth,  they  visibly  suffered  from  the  moist,  close 
heat  which  the  storm  outside  had  driven  into  the  court- 
room. From  time  to  time  one  of  them  cried  out,  "  Si- 
lence!" to  quell  a  restive  movement  in  the  audience; 
and  once  the  cravatless  officer  left  his  place,  and  came 
down  to  mine  near  the  door,  and  drove  out  the  boys 
who  were  sitting  round  me.  "  Leave !"  he  shouted. 
"  This  is  no  place  for  boys !"  They  went  out  obedient- 
ly, and  some  others  just  like  them  came  in  immediately 
and  took  their  places.  They  might  have  been  the  same 
boys,  so  far  as  any  difference  for  the  better  in  their 
looks  went.  They  were  not  pleasant  to  the  eye,  nor  to 

36 


POLICE    EEPOKT 

any  other  sense;  and  neither  were  the  young  men  nor 
old  men  who  for  the  rest  formed  the  audience  of  this 
free  dramatic  spectacle.  Their  coat-collars  came  up 
above  their  shirt-collars;  but,  greasy  as  they  were,  the 
observer  could  not  regret  this  misfit  when  chance  gave 
an  occasional  glimpse  of  their  linen — or  their  cotton, 
to  be  exact.  For  the  most  part,  they  wore  their  hair 
very  short,  and  exposed  necks  which  I  should,  I  believe, 
have  preferred  to  have  covered.  Under  the  influence 
of  the  humid  heat,  and  with  the  wet  they  brought  from 
the  outside,  they  sent  up  a  really  deplorable  smell.  I 
do  not  know  that  I  have  a  right  to  criticise  the  appear- 
ance of  some  of  their  eyes — they  seemed  perfectly  good 
eyes  to  see  with,  in  spite  of  their  sinister  or  vacant 
expression  and  gloomy  accessories;  and  certain  scars 
and  mutilations  of  the  face  and  fingers  were  the  affair 
of  their  owners  rather  than  mine.  Whenever  they  fell 
into  talk,  an  officer  of  the  court  marched  upon  them 
and  crushed  them  to  silence.  "  This  is  no  place  for 
conversation,"  he  said;  and  the  greater  part  of  them 
had  evidently  no  disposition  or  capacity  for  that  art. 
I  believe  they  were  men  and  boys  whose  utmost  mental 
effort  sufficed  to  let  their  mouths  hang  open  in  the 
absorption  of  the  performance,  and  was  by  no  means 
equal  to  comment  upon  it.  I  fancied  that  they  came 
there,  day  after  day,  the  year  round,  and  enjoyed  them- 
selves in  their  poor  way,  realizing  many  of  the  sit- 
uations presented  by  experience  of  like  predicaments, 
more  than  by  sympathy  or  an  effort  of  the  imagination. 
I  had  taken  my  place  among  them  next  the  door, 
so  that  if  my  courage  failed  me  at  any  time  I  could  go 
out  without  disturbing  the  others.  One  need  not  be 
a  very  proud  man  to  object  to  classing  himself  with 
them,  and  there  were  moments  when  I  doubted  if  I 
could  stand  my  fellow  -  spectators  mucE  longer;  but 

37 


IMPKESSIONS    AND    EXPEKIENCES 

these  accesses  of  arrogance  passed,  as  I  watched  the 
preparations  for  the  play  with  the  interest  of  a  novice. 
There  were  already  half  a  dozen  policemen  seated  at 
the  tables  in  semicircle,  and  chatting  pleasantly  to- 
gether; and  their  number  was  constantly  increased  by 
new  arrivals,  who,  as  they  came  in,  put  their  round- 
topped  straw  hats  on  one  end  of  the  semicircle,  and 
sat  down  to  fill  out  certain  printed  forms,  which  I 
suppose  related  to  the  arrests  they  had  made,  for  they 
were  presently  handed  to  the  clerk,  who  used  them  in 
calling  up  the  cases.  A  little  apart  from  the  police- 
men was  a  group  of  young  men,  whom  I  took  to  be 
the  gentlemen  of  the  bar;  among  them,  rather  more 
dapper  than  the  rest,  was  a  colored  lawyer,  who  after- 
ward, by  an  irony  of  Nemesis,  appeared  for  some  des- 
perate and  luckless  defendants  of  the  white  race  and 
of  Irish  accent.  Ey-and-by  two  or  three  desks,  placed 
conveniently  for  seeing  and  hearing  everything  against 
the  railing  on  the  clerk's  right,  were  occupied  by  re- 
porters, unmistakable  with  their  pencil  and  paper. 
Looking  from  them,  I  saw  that  the  judge's  chair  was 
now  filled  by  a  quiet-looking  gentleman,  who  seemed, 
behind  his  spectacles,  to  be  communing  with  himself  in 
a  sad  and  bored  anticipation.  At  times  he  leaned  for- 
ward and  spoke  with  the  clerk  or  one  of  the  gentlemen 
of  the  bar,  and  then  fell  back  in  sober  meditation. 

Like  all  other  public  exhibitions,  the  police  court 
failed  a  little  in  point  of  punctuality.  It  was  adver- 
tised to  open  at  nine  o'clock,  but  it  was  nearer  ten 
when,  after  several  false  alarms,  the  clerk  in  a  rapid, 
inarticulate  formula  declared  it  now  opened,  and  in- 
voked the  blessing  of  God  on  the  Commonwealth  of 
Massachusetts.  Even  then  there  was  a  long  wait  be- 
fore we  of  the  audience  heard  the  scuffling  of  the  feet 
of  the  prisoners  on  what  seemed  a  broad  stairway  be- 

38 


POLICE    REPORT 

hind  the  barrier  at  the  judge's  right,  and  before  any 
of  them  came  in  sight  they  were  commanded  by  the 
attendant  policeman  to  sit  down,  and  apparently  did 
so,  on  the  top  of  the  stairs.  The  clerk  now  turned 
toward  them  with  a  sheaf  of  the  forms  which  the  police- 
men had  filled  out  in  his  hand,  and  successively  ad- 
dressed them  by  name : 

"Larry  McShane!" 

"  Here,  sor." 

"  Complained  of  for  being  drunk.  Guilty  or  not 
guilty?7' 

"  Guilty,  sor." 

"  Pay  a  fine  of  one  dollar  and  costs,  and  stand  com- 
mitted to  the  House  of  Industry." 

He  jotted  something  down  on  the  back  of  each  in- 
dictment, and  half  turned  to  toss  it  onto  his  desk,  and 
then  resumed  the  catalogue  of  these  offenders,  accusing 
and  dooming  them  all  in  the  same  weary  and  passion- 
less monotone. 

I  confess  that  I  had  at  the  time  the  strongest  curi- 
osity to  see  them,  but  it  has  since  struck  me  that  it 
was  a  finer  effect  merely  to  hear  their  voices  in  re- 
sponse, and  to  leave  their  figures  and  faces  to  the 
fancy.  Sometimes  the  voice  that  answered  "  Guilty  " 
was  youthful,  and  sometimes,  I  grieve  to  say,  it  was 
feminine,  though  under  the  circumstances  it  had  nat- 
urally that  subdued  tone  which  is  thought  such  an 
excellent  thing  in  woman.  Usually,  however,  the 
voices  were  old  and  raucous,  as  if  they  had  many 
times  made  the  same  plea  in  the  same  place,  and  they 
pronounced  sir  sor.  The  clerk's  sheaf  of  accusations 
being  exhausted,  they  all  apparently  scuffled  down- 
stairs again.  But  a  number  must  have  remained,  for 
now,  after  this  sort  of  overture,  the  entertainment  be- 
gan in  earnest,  the  actors  on  the  scene  appearing  as 

39 


IMPEESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

they  were  summoned  from  the  same  invisible  space 
behind  the  railing,  which  I  think  was  probably  sunk 
a  little  lower  than  the  level  of  the  auditorium,  and 
which  might,  to  humor  the  theatrical  illusion,  be  re- 
garded as  the  green-room. 


II 


The  first  piece  was  what  I  may  call  a  little  Police 
Pastoral,  in  recognition  of  the  pretty  touch  of  poetry 
which  graced  it.  A  half-grown,  baddish-looking  boy 
was  arraigned  for  assault  and  battery,  and  took  his 
place  at  one  end  of  that  long  table  on  which  rested 
the  clerk's  desk,  while  a  young  girl  of  thirteen  or 
fourteen  advanced  from  the  audience  and  placed  her- 
self at  the  other  end.  She  was  dressed  in  a  well-fitting, 
ready-made  suit,  which  somehow  suggested  itself  as 
having  been  "  marked  down "  to  come  within  her 
means;  and  she  wore  a  cheap  yet  tasteful  hat,  under 
which  her  face,  as  honest  as  it  was  comely,  looked 
modestly  up  at  the  judge  when  he  questioned  her.  It 
appeared  that  she  was  passing  the  apple-stand  which 
the  defendant  was  keeping  for  his  mother,  when  he 
had  suddenly  abandoned  his  charge,  followed  her  into 
a  gate  where  she  had  taken  refuge,  and  struck  her; 
her  cries  attracted  the  police,  and  he  was  arrested. 
The  officer  corroborated  her  story,  and  then  the  judge 
made  a  signal  to  the  prisoner,  by  which  it  seemed  that 
he  was  privileged  to  cross-question  his  accuser.  The 
injured  youth  seized  the  occasion,  and  in  a  loud,  bully- 
ing, yet  plaintive,  tone  proceeded  as  best  he  could  to 
damage  the  case  against  him. 

He:  "  Didn't  you  pass  my  mother's  stand  with  them 
girls  the  day  before  ?" 

40 


POLICE    KEPOET 

She,  frankly:  "Yes,  I  did." 

He :  "  And  didn't  you  laugh  at  me,  and  call  me  an 
apple-woman  ?" 

She,  as  before :  "  Yes,  I  did." 

He :  "  And  hain't  you  hit  me,  sometimes,  before 
this «" 

She,  evasively :  "  I've  never  hit  you  to  hurt  you." 

He :  "  Now,  that  hain't  the  question.  The  question 
is  whether  you've  ever  hit  me." 

She :  "  Yes,  I  have — when  you  were  trying  to  hold 
me.  It  was  the  other  girls  called  you  names.  I  only 
called  you  names  once." 

He:  "  I  want  to  know  whether  I  hurt  you  any  when 
you  hollered  out  that  way  ?" 

She :  "  Yes,  you  did.  And  if  I  hadn't  screamed 
you  would  have  done  it.  I  don't  suppose  you'd  have 
hurt  me  a  great  deal,  but  you  have  hurt  some  of  the 
girls." 

The  Judge :  "  Did  he  bruise  you  severely  when  he 
struck  you  ?" 

She,  with  a  relenting  glance,  full  of  soft  compassion, 
at  her  enemy :  "  Well,  he  didn't  bruise  me  very  much." 

The  Judge :  "  Has  he  been  in  the  habit  of  assaulting 
the  other  young  girls  ?" 

She :  "  He  never  did  me  before."  Then,  with  a  sud- 
den burst :  "  And  I  think  I  was  every  bit  as  much  to 
blame  as  he  was !  I  had  no  business  to  tease  him." 

Here  the  judge,  instead  of  joining  the  hands  of  these 
children  and  sending  them  forward  with  his  blessing 
to  dance  and  sing  a  little  duet  together,  as  would  have 
happened  on  any  other  stage,  said  that  he  would  fine 
the  defendant  seven  dollars.  The  defendant  gave  way 
to  a  burst  of  grief,  and  the  plaintiff,  astonished  at  this 
untoward  conclusion,  threw  the  judge  a  pathetic  and 
reproachful  look  and  left  the  stand  in  painful  bewilder- 

41 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

ment.  I  felt  sorry  for  her,  but  I  could  not  share  her 
pity  for  the  defendant,  and  my  light  mind  was  quickly 
distracted  by  the  next  piece. 


Ill 


I  may  say  here  that  the  features  of  the  performance 
followed  one  another  rapidly,  as  at  a  variety  theatre, 
without  any  disagreeable  waits  or  the  drop  of  a  cur- 
tain. If  I  had  anything  to  complain  of  it  was  the 
swiftness  of  their  succession.  I  was  not  yet  habitu- 
ated to  this,  when  I  found  the  scene  occupied  by  the 
two  principal  actors  in  a  laughable  little  interlude  of 
Habitual  Drunkenness.  A  powerfully  built,  middle- 
aged  Irishman,  with  evidences  of  coal-heaving  thick 
upon  his  hands  and  ground  into  his  face  to  the  roots 
of  his  hair,  was  standing  at  one  end  of  that  long  table, 
and  listening  to  the  tale  of  the  policeman  who,  finding 
him  quarrelsomely  and  noisily  drunk,  and  not  being 
able  to  prevail  with  him  to  go  home,  had  arrested  him. 
When  he  finished,  the  judge  said  to  the  defendant,  who 
had  stood  rolling  his  eyes — conspicuous  from  the  black 
around  them — upon  the  spectators,  as  if  at  a  loss  to 
make  out  what  all  this  might  be  about,  that  he  could 
ask  any  questions  he  liked  of  the  plaintiff. 

"  I  don't  want  to  ask  him  anything,  sor,"  replied 
the  defendant,  like  one  surprised  at  being  expected  to 
take  an  interest  in  some  alien  affair. 

"  Have  you  ever  seen  the  defendant  drunk  before  ?" 
asked  the  judge. 

"  Yes,  your  honor ;  I've  seen  him  drunk  half  a  dozen 
times,  and  I've  taken  him  home  to  keep  him  out  of 
harm's  way.  He's  an  industrious  man  when  he  isn't 

in  drink." 

42 


POLICE    REPORT 

"  Is  he  usually  disorderly  when  drunk  ?" 

"  Well,  he  and  his  wife  generally  fight  when  he  gets 
home,"  the  policeman  suggested. 

The  judge  desisted,  and  the  defendant's  counsel 
rose  and  signified  his  intention  to  cross-question  the 
plaintiff :  the  counsel  was  that  attorney  of  African  race 
whom  I  have  mentioned. 

"  Now,  we  don't  deny  that  the  defendant  was  drunk 
at  the  time  of  his  arrest;  but  the  question  is  whether 
he  is  an  habitual  drunkard.  How  many  times  have 
you  seen  him  drunk  the  past  month  ?" 

"  About  half  a  dozen  times." 

"  Seven  times  ?" 

"  I  can't  say." 

"Three  times?" 

"  More  than  three  times." 

"  More  than  twice  you  will  swear  to  ?" 

"Yes." 

"  Now,  I  wish  you  to  be  very  careful,  please :  can 
you  state,  under  oath,  that  you  have  seen  him  drunk 
four  times  ?" 

"  Yes,"  said  the  policeman,  "  I  can  swear  to  that." 

"  Very  good,"  said  the  counsel,  with  the  air  of  hav- 
ing caught  the  witness  tripping.  "  That  is  all." 

Aside  from  the  satisfaction  that  one  naturally  feels 
in  seeing  any  policeman  bullied,  I  think  it  did  me 
good  to  have  my  learned  colored  brother  badger  a 
white  man.  The  thing  was  so  long  the  other  way,  in 
every  walk  of  life,  that  for  the  sake  of  the  bad  old 
times,  when  the  sight  would  have  been  something  to 
destroy  the  Constitution  and  subvert  social  order,  I 
could  have  wished  that  he  might  have  succeeded  bet- 
ter in  browbeating  his  witness.  But  it  was  really  a 
failure,  as  far  as  concerned  his  object. 

"  The  question,  your  honor,"  the  lawyer  added,  turn- 

43 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

ing  to  the  judge,  "  is,  what  is  habitual  drunkenness  ? 
I  should  like  to  ask  the  defendant  a  query  or  two. 
Now,  Mr.  O'Ryan,  how  often  do  you  indulge  your- 
self in  a  social  glass  ?" 

"Sor?" 

"  How  often  do  you  drink  ?" 

"  Whenever  I  can  get  it,  sor." 

The  audience  appreciated  this  frankness,  and  were 
silenced  by  a  threatening  foray  of  the  cravatless  officer. 

"You  mean,"  suggested  the  attorney,  smoothly, 
"  that  you  take  a  drink  of  beer,  now  and  then,  when 
you  are  at  work." 

"  I  mane  that,  sor.    A  horse  couldn't  do  widout  it." 

"  Very  good.  But  you  deny  that  you  are  habitually 
intoxicated  ?" 

"Sor?" 

"  You  are  not  in  the  habit  of  getting  drunk  ?" 

"No,  sor!" 

"  Very  good.  You  are  not  in  the  habit  of  getting 
drunk." 

"  I  never  get  dhrunk  whin  I'm  at  work,  sor.  I  get 
dhrunk  Saturday  nights." 

"  Yes ;  when  you  have  had  a  hard  week's  work.  I 
understand  that — " 

"  I  have  a  hard  wake's  worruk  every  wake !"  inter- 
rupted the  defendant. 

"  But  this  is  a  thing  that  has  grown  upon  you  of 
late,  as  I  understand.  You  were  formerly  a  sober, 
temperate  man,  as  your  habits  of  industry  imply." 

"Sor?" 

"  You  have  lately  given  way  to  a  fondness  for  liquor, 
but  up  to  within  six  months  or  a  year  ago  you  never 
drank  to  excess." 

"  No,  sor !    I've  dhrunk  ever  since  I  was  born,  and 

I'll  dhrink  till  I  die." 

44 


POLICE    REPOKT 

The  officer  could  not  keep  us  quiet  now.  The  coun- 
sel looked  down  at  his  table  in  a  futile  way,  and  then 
took  his  seat  after  some  rambling  observations,  amid 
smiles  of  ironical  congratulation  from  the  other  gentle- 
men of  the  bar. 

The  defendant  confronted  the  judge  with  the  calm 
face  of  a  man  who  has  established  his  innocence  be- 
yond cavil. 

"  What  is  the  reputation  of  this  man  in  his  neigh- 
borhood ?"  inquired  the  judge  of  the  policeman. 

"  lie's  an  ugly  fellow.  And  his  wife  is  full  as  bad. 
They  generally  get  drunk  together." 

"  Any  children  ?» 

"  "No,  sir." 

The  defendant  regarded  the  judge  with  heightened 
satisfaction  in  this  confirmation  of  his  own  declaration. 
The  judge  leaned  over  and  said  in  a  confidential  way 
to  the  clerk,  "  Give  him  six  months  in  the  House  of 
Correction." 

A  wild  lament  broke  from  the  audience,  and  a  wom- 
an with  a  face  bruised  to  a  symphony  in  green,  yellow, 
and  black  thus  identified  herself  as  the  wife  of  the 
defendant,  who  stood  vacantly  turning  his  cap  round 
in  his  hand  while  sympathizing  friends  hurried  her 
from  the  room.  The  poor  creature  probably  knew  that 
if  in  their  late  differences  she  had  got  more  than  she 
deserved,  she  had  not  got  more  than  she  had  been  will- 
ing to  give,  and  was  moved  by  this  reflection.  Other 
moralists,  who  do  not  like  to  treat  woman  as  a  reason- 
able being,  may  attribute  her  sorrow  to  mere  blind 
tenderness  or  hysterical  excitement.  I  could  not  see 
that  it  touched  the  spectators  in  any  way;  and  I  sus- 
pect that,  whatever  was  thought  of  her  escape  from  a 
like  fate,  there  was  a  general  acquiescence  in  the  jus- 
tice of  his.  He  was  either  stunned  by  it,  or  failed  to 

45 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

take  it  in,  for  he  remained  standing  at  the  end  of  the 
table  and  facing  the  judge  till  the  policeman  in  charge 
took  him  by  the  arm  and  stood  him  aside. 


IV 


He  sat  down,  and  I  saw  him  no  more ;  but  I  had  no 
time  to  regret  him,  for  his  place  was  instantly  occu- 
pied by  a  person  who  stepped  within  the  bar  from  the 
audience.  I  had  already  noticed  him  coming  in  and 
going  out  of  the  court-room,  apparently  under  strong 
excitement,  and  hovering  about,  now  among  the  gen- 
tlemen of  the  bar  and  now  among  friends  in  the  audi- 
ence. He  had  an  excited  and  eccentric  look,  and  yet 
he  looked  like  a  gentleman — a  gentleman  in  distress 
of  mind;  I  had  supposed  that  he  could  not  be  one  of 
the  criminal  classes,  or  he  would  scarcely  have  been 
allowed  so  much  at  large.  At  the  same  time  that  he 
took  his  place  he  was  confronted  from  the  other  end  of 
the  long  table  by  a  person  whom  I  will  call  a  lady,  be- 
cause I  observed  that  every  one  else  did  so.  This  lady's 
person  tended  to  fat;  she  had  a  large,  red  face,  and  I 
learned  without  surprise  that  she  was  a  cook.  She 
wore  a  crimson  shawl,  and  a  bonnet  abounding  in  blos- 
soms and  vegetables  of  striking  colors,  and  she  had  one 
arm,  between  the  wrist  and  elbow,  impressively  swathed 
in  linen ;  she  caressed,  as  it  were,  a  small  water-pitcher, 
which  I  felt,  in  spite  of  its  ordinary  appearance,  was 
somehow  historical.  In  fact,  it  came  out  that  this 
pitcher  played  an  important  part  in  the  assault  which 
the  lady  accused  the  gentleman  at  the  other  end  of  the 
table  of  committing  upon  her. 

It  seemed  from  her  story  that  the  gentleman  was  a 

boarder  in  the  house  where  she  was  cook,  and  that  he 

46 


POLICE    KEPOKT 

was  in  the  habit  of  intruding  upon  her  in  the  kitchen 
against  her  will  and  express  command.  A  week  be- 
fore (I  understood  that  she  had  spent  the  intervening 
time  in  suffering  and  disability)  she  had  ordered  him 
out,  and  he  had  turned  furiously  upon  her  with  an 
uplifted  chair  and  struck  her  on  the  arm  with  it,  and 
then  had  thrown  at  her  head  the  pitcher  which  she  now 
held  in  her  hands. 

There  were  other  circumstances  of  outrage  which  I 
cannot  now  recall,  but  they  are  not  important  in  view 
of  the  leading  facts. 

Further  testimony  in  behalf  of  the  plaintiff  was 
offered  by  another  lady,  whose  countenance  expressed 
second  -  girl  as  unmistakably  as  that  of  the  plaintiff 
expressed  cook.  She  was  of  the  dish-faced  Irish  type, 
and  whereas  the  cook  was  of  an  Old- World  robustness, 
her  witness  had  the  pallor  and  flat-chestedness  of  the 
women  of  her  race  who  are  born  in  America;  she  pre- 
ferred several  shades  of  blue  in  her  costume,  which 
was  of  ready-made  and  marked-down  effect.  This  lady 
with  difficulty  comprehended  the  questions  intended  to 
elicit  her  name  and  the  fact  of  her  acquaintance  with 
the  plaintiff,  and  I  noticed  a  like  density  of  under- 
standing in  most  of  the  other  persons  testifying  or  ar- 
raigned in  this  court.  In  fact,  I  came  to  wonder  if 
the  thick-headedness  of  average  uneducated  people  was 
not  much  greater  than  I  had  hitherto  suspected,  in  my 
easy  optimism.  It  was  certainly  inconceivable  why, 
with  intelligence  enough  to  come  in  when  it  rained,  the 
cook  should  have  summoned  this  witness.  She  testified 
at  once  that  she  had  not  seen  the  assault,  and  did  not 
know  that  the  cook  had  been  hurt;  and  no  prompting 
of  the  plaintiff's  counsel  could  inspire  her  with  a  bet- 
ter recollection.  In  the  hands  of  the  defendant's  law- 
yer she  developed  the  fact  that  his  client  was  reputed  a 

47 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

quiet,  inoffensive  boarder,  and  that  she  never  knew  of 
any  displeasures  between  him  and  the  cook. 

"Did  you  ever  see  this  lady  intoxicated?"  inquired 
the  lawyer. 

The  witness  reflected.  "  I  don't  understand  you," 
she  answered,  finally. 

"  Have  you  ever  known  her  to  be  overcome  by 
drink?" 

The  witness  considered  this  point  also,  and  in  due 
time  gave  it  up,  and  turned  a  face  of  blank  appeal 
upon  the  judge,  who  came  to  her  rescue. 

"Does  she  drink  —  drink  liquor?  Does  she  get 
drunk?" 

"  Oil!    Oh  yes;  she's  tipsy  sometimes." 

"  Was  she  tipsy,"  asked  the  lawyer,  "  on  the  day  of 
the  alleged  assault  ?" 

The  witness  again  turned  to  the  magistrate  for  help. 

"  Was  she  tipsy  on  the  day  when  she  says  this  gen- 
tleman struck  her  with  a  chair  and  threw  the  pitcher 
at  her  head  ?" 

"  Yes,  sir,"  replied  the  witness,  "  she  was." 

"  Was  she  very  tipsy  ?"  the  lawyer  pursued. 

The  witness  was  equal  to  this  question.  "  Well,  yes, 
sir,  she  was.  Anyway,  she  hadn't  left  anything  in  the 
bottle  on  her  bureau." 

"  When  did  you  see  the  bottle  full  ?" 

"  The  night  before.  Or  in  the  evening.  She  com- 
menced drinking  in  the  night." 

"  What  was  in  the  bottle  ?" 

"  A  pint  of  whiskey." 

"  That  will  do,"  said  the  lawyer. 

The  witness  stepped  down  and  genteelly  resumed 
her  place  near  the  plaintiff.  Neither  of  the  ladies 
changed  countenance,  or  seemed  in  any  wise  aware 

that  the  testimony  just  given  had  been  detrimental  to 

48 


POLICE    REPORT 

the  plaintiff's  cause.  They  talked  pleasantly  together, 
and  were  presently  alike  interested  in  the  testimony  of 
a  witness  to  the  defendant's  good  character.  He  tes- 
tified that  the  defendant  was  a  notoriously  peaceable 
person,  who  was  in  some  sort  of  scientific  employment, 
but  where  or  what  I  could  not  make  out ;  he  was  a  col- 
lege graduate,  and  it  was  quite  unimaginable  to  the 
witness  that  he  should  be  the  object  of  this  sort  of 
charge. 

When  the  witness  stood  aside  the  defendant  was 
allowed  to  testify  in  his  own  behalf,  which  he  did 
with  great  energy.  He  provided  himself  with  a  chair, 
and  when  he  came  to  the  question  of  the  assault  he 
dramatized  the  scene  with  appropriate  action.  He 
described  with  vividness  the  relative  positions  of  him- 
self and  the  cook  when,  on  the  day  given,  he  went  into 
the  kitchen  to  see  if  the  landlady  were  there,  and  was 
ordered  out  by  her.  "  She  didn't  give  me  time  to  go, 
but  caught  up  a  chair  and  came  at  me,  thus."  Here 
he  represented  with  the  chair  in  his  hand  an  assault 
that  made  the  reporters,  who  sat  near  him,  quail  be- 
fore the  violence  of  the  mere  dumb-show.  "  I  caught 
the  rung  of  the  chair  in  my  hand,  thus,  and  instinct- 
ively pushed  it,  thus.  I  suppose,"  he  added,  in  dic- 
tion of  memorable  elegance,  "that  the  impact  of  the 
chair  in  falling  back  against  her  wrist  may  have  pro- 
duced the  contusions  of  which  she  complains." 

The  judge  and  the  bar  smiled;  the  audience,  not 
understanding,  looked  serious. 

"And  what,"  said  the  judge,  "about  throwing  the 
pitcher  at  her  ?" 

"  I  never  saw  the  pitcher,  your  honor,  till  I  saw  it 
in  court.  I  threw  no  pitcher  at  her,  but  retreated  from 
the  kitchen  as  quickly  as  possible." 

"That  will  do,"  said  the  judge.     The  plaintiff's 

49 


IMPEESSIONS    AND    EXPEKIENCES 

counsel  did  the  best  that  could  be  done  for  no  case 
at  all  in  a  brief  argument.  The  judge  heard  him  pa- 
tiently, and  then  quietly  remarked :  "  The  charge  is 
dismissed.  The  defendant  is  discharged.  Call  the 
next  case." 

The  plaintiff  had  probably  imagined  that  the  affair 
was  going  in  her  favor.  She  evidently  required  the 
explanation  of  her  counsel  that  it  had  gone  against 
her  and  all  was  over;  for  she  looked  at  the  judge  in 
some  surprise  before  she  turned  and  walked  out  of 
the  court-room,  with  quiet  dignity,  still  caressing  her 
pitcher  and  amicably  accompanied  by  the  other  lady, 
her  damaging  witness. 


Before  she  was  well  out  of  the  door,  a  lady  -  like 
young  woman  in  black  was  on  the  stand,  testifying 
against  a  prisoner,  who  did  not  confront  her  from  the 
other  end  of  the  long  table,  but  stood  where  he  seemed 
to  have  been  seated  on  the  top  of  those  stairs  I  have 
imagined  behind  the  railing.  He  looked  twenty  one 
or  two  years  of  age,  and  he  had  not  at  all  a  bad  face, 
but  rather  refined;  he  was  well  dressed,  and  was  gen- 
tlemanlike in  the  same  degree  that  she  was  ladylike. 
From  her  testimony  it  appeared  to  me  that  his  offence 
was  one  that  might  fitly  be  condoned,  and  in  my  igno- 
rance I  was  surprised  to  find  that  it  was  taken  seri- 
ously by  the  court.  She  had  seen  him,  from  the  top 
of  some  steps  in  the  shop  where  she  was  employed, 
open  a  drawer  in  the  bookkeeper's  desk,  and  take  out 
of  it  a  revolver  and  some  postage-stamps;  but  on  his 
discovering  her  he  had  instantly  replaced  them  and 
tried  to  make  his  escape.  She  gave  her  evidence  in  a 

low  voice,  and,  as  I  thought,  reluctantly ;  and  one  could 

50 


POLICE    REPORT 

very  well  imagine  that  she  might  have  regretted  caus- 
ing his  arrest;  but  it  was  to  be  considered  that  her 
own  reputation  was  probably  at  stake,  and  if  his  theft 
had  succeeded  she  might  have  been  accused  of  it.  When 
she  stood  aside,  the  judge  turned  to  the  defendant,  who 
had  kept  quite  still,  nervously  twisting  something  be- 
tween his  fingers,  and  questioned  him.  He  did  not  at- 
tempt to  deny  the  facts;  he  admitted  them,  but  urged 
that  he  had  immediately  put  the  stamps  and  pistol  back 
into  the  drawer,  from  which,  indeed,  he  had  hardly 
lifted  them.  The  judge  heard  him  patiently,  and  the 
young  man  went  on,  with  something  of  encouragement, 
to  explain  that  he  only  meant  to  take  the  things  to  spite 
the  owner  of  the  shop,  on  account  of  some  grudge  be- 
tween them,  and  that  he  had  not  realized  that  it  was 
stealing.  He  besought  the  judge,  in  terms  that  were 
moving,  but  not  abject,  to  deal  mercifully  with  him; 
and  he  stood  twisting  that  invisible  something  between 
his  fingers  and  keeping  his  eyes  fixed  on  those  of  the 
magistrate,  with  a  miserable  smile,  while  he  promised 
that  he  would  not  offend  again. 

The  judge  passed  his  hand  to  and  fro  over  his  chin, 
and  now  dropped  his  eyes,  and  now  glanced  at  the 
culprit,  who  seemed  scarcely  more  unhappy. 

"  Haven't  I  seen  you  here  before  ?"  he  asked  at  last. 

"  Yes,"  I  could  hardly  hear  the  prisoner  assent. 

"  How  often  ?» 

"  Twice." 

"  What  for  ?" 

"  Theft,"  gasped  the  wretched  creature. 

The  judge  moved  in  his  chair  with  a  discomfort 
that  he  had  not  shown  throughout  the  morning's  busi- 
ness. "  If  this  were  the  first  time,  or  the  second,  I 
should  have  been  glad  to  let  you  off  with  a  slight  fine. 

But  I  can't  do  that  now.     I  must  send  you  to  the 
s  51 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

House  of  Correction."    He  nodded  to  the  clerk :  "  Two 
months." 

The  prisoner  remained,  with  that  nervous  twisting 
of  his  fingers,  eying  the  judge  with  his  vague  smile, 
as  if  he  could  not  realize  what  had  befallen.  He  did 
not  sit  down  till  the  next  culprit  rose  and  stood  near 
him.  Then  a  sort  of  fatal  change  passed  over  his  face. 
It  looked  like  despair.  I  confess  that  I  had  not  much 
heart  for  his  successor.  I  was  sick,  thinking  how,  so 
far  as  this  world  was  concerned,  this  wretch  had  been 
sent  to  hell;  for  the  House  of  Correction  is  not  a 
purgatory  even,  out  of  which  one  can  hopefully  under- 
take to  pray  periculant  spirits.  To  be  sure,  the  police 
court  is  not  a  cure  of  souls;  and  doubtless  his  doom 
was  as  light  as  the  law  allowed.  But  I  could  have 
wished  that  the  judge  had  distrusted  his  memory  or 
taken  on  his  conscience  the  merciful  sin  of  ignoring  it. 
He  seemed  very  patient,  and  I  do  not  question  but  he 
acted  according  to  light  and  knowledge.  This  may 
have  been  a  hopeless  thief.  But  it  was  nevertheless  a 
terrible  fate.  The  chances  were  a  thousand  against 
one  that  he  should  hereafter  be  anything  but  a  thief, 
if  he  were  not  worse.  After  all,  when  one  thinks  of 
what  the  consequences  of  justice  are,  one  doubts  if 
there  is  any  justice  in  it.  Perhaps  the  thing  we  call 
mercy  is  the  divine  conception  of  justice. 


VI 

It  was  a  thief  again  who  was  on  the  stage;  but  not 
a  thief  like  that  other,  who,  for  all  the  reality  there 
was  in  the  spectacle,  might  have  gone  behind  the  scenes 
and  washed  the  chalk  off  his  white  face.  This  thief 
was  of  the  kind  whose  fortunes  the  old  naturalistic 

52 


POLICE    REPORT 

novelists  were  fond  of  following  in  fictions  of  auto- 
biographic form,  and  who  sometimes  actually  wrote 
their  own  histories;  a  conventional  thief,  of  those  dear 
to  De  Foe  and  the  Spanish  picaresque  romancers,  with 
a  flavor  of  good  literature  about  him.  Nothing  could 
have  been  more  classic  in  incident  than  the  story  of 
the  plaintiff,  an  honest-looking  young  fellow,  who  testi- 
fied that  he  had  met  the  prisoner  on  the  street,  and, 
learning  that  he  was  out  of  work  and  out  of  money, 
had  taken  him  home  to  his  room  and  shared  his  bed 
with  him.  I  do  not  know,  in  just  what  calling  this 
primitive  and  trustful  hospitality  is  practised;  the 
plaintiff  looked  and  was  dressed  like  a  working-man. 
His  strange  bedfellow  proved  an  early  riser;  he  stole 
away  without  disturbing  his  host,  and  carried  with 
him  all  the  money  that  was  in  his  host's  pockets.  By 
an  odd  turn  of  luck  the  two  encountered  shortly  after 
breakfast,  and  the  prisoner  ran.  The  plaintiff  follow- 
ed, but  the  other  eluded  him,  and  was  again  sauntering 
about  in  safety,  when  the  eye  of  a  third  actor  in  the 
drama  fell  upon  him.  This  was  a  young  man  who 
kept  some  sort  of  a  small  shop,  and  who  was  called  to 
the  witness-stand  in  behalf  of  the  prosecution.  He 
was  as  stupid  as  he  could  well  be  in  some  respects, 
and  very  simple  questions  had  to  be  repeated  several 
times  to  him.  Yet  he  had  the  ferret-like  instinct  of 
the  thief-catcher,  and  he  instantly  saw  that  his  look 
fluttered  the  guilty  rogue,  who  straightway  turned  and 
fled.  But  this  time  he  had  a  sharper  pursuer  than  his 
host,  and  he  was  coursed  through  all  his  turns  and 
windings,  up  stairs  and  down,  in  houses  and  out,  and 
gripped  at  last. 

"  As  soon  as  I  saw  him  start  to  run,"  said  the  wit- 
ness, who  told  his  story  with  a  graphic  jauntiness,  "  I 

knowed  he'd  got  something." 

53 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

u  You  didn't  know  I'd  got  anything !"  exclaimed  the 
thief. 

"  I  knowed  you'd  get  ninety  days  if  I  caught  up 
with  you,"  retorted  the  witness,  wagging  his  head  tri- 
umphantly. 

As  the  officer  entered  the  station-house  with  his 
prisoner,  the  host,  by  another  odd  chance,  was  coming 
out,  after  stating  his  loss  to  the  police,  and  identified 
his  truant  guest. 

The  money,  all  but  thirty  cents,  was  found  upon 
him;  and  though  he  represented  that  he  had  lawfully 
earned  it  by  haying  in  Dedham,  the  fact  that  it  was 
in  notes  of  the  denominations  which  the  plaintiff  re- 
membered was  counted  against  him,  and  he  got  the 
ninety  days  which  his  captor  had  prophesied.  He, 
too,  sat  down,  and  I  saw  him  no  more. 


VII 

!N"ow  arose  literally  a  cloud  of  witnesses,  who  came 
forward  from  some  of  the  back  seats  and  occupied  the 
benches  hitherto  held  by  the  plaintiffs  and  witnesses 
in  the  preceding  cases.  They  were  of  all  shades  of 
blackness,  and  of  both  sexes  and  divers  ages,  and  they 
were  there  in  their  solemn  best  clothes,  with  their  faces 
full  of  a  decorous  if  superficial  seriousness.  I  must 
except  from  this  sweeping  assertion,  however,  the  lady 
who  was  the  defendant  in  the  case:  she  was  a  young 
person  with  a  great  deal  of  what  is  called  style  about 
her,  and  I  had  seen  her  going  and  coming  throughout 
the  morning  in  a  high  excitement  which  she  seemed 
to  enjoy.  It  is  difficult  for  a  lady  whose  lips  have  such 
a  generous  breadth  and  such  a  fine  outward  roll  to  keep 
from  smiling,  perhaps,  under  any  circumstances;  and 

54 


POLICE    REPORT 

it  may  have  been  light-hear tedness  rather  than  light- 
mindedness  that  enabled  her  to  support  so  gayly  a  re- 
sponsibility that  weighed  down  all  the  other  parties 
concerned.  She  wore  a  tight-skirted  black  walking- 
dress,  with  a  waist  of  perhaps  caricatured  smallness; 
her  hat  was  full  of  red  and  yellow  flowers;  on  her 
hands,  which  were  in  drawing  with  her  lips  rather  than 
her  waist,  were  a  pair  of  white  kid  gloves.  As  she 
advanced  to  take  her  place  inside  the  prisoner's  bar  she 
gave  in  charge  to  a  very  mournful-looking  elder  of 
her  race  a  little  girl,  two  or  three  years  of  age,  as  fash- 
ionably dressed  as  herself,  and  tottering  upon  little 
high-heeled  boots.  The  old  man  lifted  the  child  in  his 
arms  and  funereally  took  his  seat  among  the  witnesses, 
while  the  culprit  turned  her  full-blown  smile  upon  the 
judge  and  confidently  pleaded  not  guilty  to  the  clerk's 
reading  of  the  indictment,  in  which  she  was  charged 
with  threatening  the  person  and  life  of  the  plaintiff. 
At  the  same  moment  a  sort  of  pleased  expectation  light- 
ed up  all  those  dull  countenances  in  the  court-room 
which  had  been  growing  more  and  more  jaded  under 
the  process  of  the  accusations  and  condemnations.  The 
soddenest  habitue  of  the  place  brightened,  the  lawyers 
and  policemen  eased  themselves  in  their  chairs,  and  I 
fancied  that  the  judge  himself  relaxed.  I  could  not 
refuse  my  sympathy  to  the  general  content ;  I  took  an- 
other respite  from  the  thought  of  my  poor  thief,  and 
I  too  lent  myself  to  the  hope  of  enjoyment  from  this 
Laughable  After-piece. 

The  accuser  also  wore  black,  but  her  fashionable- 
ness,  as  compared  with  that  of  the  defendant,  was  as 
the  fashionableness  of  Boston  to  that  of  New  York; 
she  had  studied  a  subdued  elegance,  and  she  wore  a 
crape  veil  instead  of  flowers  on  her  hat.  She  was  of  a 

sort  of  dusky  pallor,  and  her  features  had  not  the  Con- 

55 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

goish,  fulness  nor  her  skin  the  brilliancy  of  the  de- 
fendant's. Her  taste  in  kid  gloves  was  a  decorous 
black. 

She  testified  that  she  was  employed  as  second-girl 
in  a  respectable  family,  and  that  the  day  before  she 
had  received  a  visit  at  the  door  from  the  defendant, 
who  had  invited  her  to  come  down  the  street  to  a  cer- 
tain point  and  be  beaten  within  an  inch  of  her  life. 
On  her  failure  to  appear,  the  defendant  came  again, 
and  notified  her  that  she  should  hold  the  beating  in 
store  for  her  and  bestow  it  whenever  she  caught  her 
out-of-doors.  These  visits  and  threats  had  terrified  the 
plaintiff,  and  annoyed  the  respectable  family  with 
which  she  lived,  and  she  had  invoked  the  law. 

During  the  delivery  of  her  complaint,  the  defendant 
had  been  lifting  and  lowering  herself  by  the  bar  at 
which  she  stood,  in  anticipation  of  the  judge's  per- 
mission to  question  the  plaintiff.  At  a  nod  from  him 
she  now  flung  herself  half  across  it. 

"What  M  I  say  I'd  whip  you  forf" 

The  Plaintiff,  thoughtfully:  "What  ?d  you  say 
you'd  whip  me  for  ?" 

The  Defendant,  beating  the  railing  with  her  hand: 
"Yes,  that's  what  I  ast  you:  what  for?" 

The  Plaintiff,  with  dignity :  "  I  don't  know  as  you 
told  me  what  for." 

The  Defendant:  "  Now,  now,  none  o'  that!  You 
just  answer  my  question." 

The  Judge :  "  She  has  answered  it." 

The  Defendant,  after  a  moment  of  surprise :  "  Well, 
then,  I'll  ast  her  another  question.  Didn't  I  tell  you 
if  I  ever  caught  you  goin'  to  a  ball  with  my  husband 
ag'in  I'd—" 

The  Plaintiff:  "I  didn't  go  to  no  ball  with  your 
husband !" 

56 


POLICE    KEPOKT 

The  Defendant:  "  You  didn't  go  with  him!    Ah—" 

The  Plaintiff:  "I  went  with  the  crowd.  I  didn't 
know  who  I  went  with." 

The  Defendant:  "  Well,  I  know  who  paid  fifty  cents 
for  your  ticket!  Why  don't  he  give  me  any  of  his 
money?  Hain't  spent  fifty  cents  on  me  or  his  child, 
there,  since  it  was  born.  An?  he  goes  with  you  all 
the  time — to  church  and  everywhere." 

The  Judge:  "  That  will  do." 

The  plaintiff,  who  had  listened  "  with  sick  and  scorn- 
ful looks  averse,"  stepped  from  the  stand,  and  a  dusky 
gentlewoman,  as  she  looked,  took  her  place,  and  cor- 
roborated her  testimony.  She  also  wore  genteel  black, 
and  she  haughtily  turned  from  the  defendant's  splen- 
dors as  she  answered  much  the  same  questions  that 
the  latter  had  put  to  the  plaintiff.  She  used  her  with 
the  disdain  that  a  lady  who  takes  care  of  bank  parlors 
may  show  to -a  social  inferior  with  whom  her  grand- 
son has  been  trapped  into  a  distasteful  marriage,  and 
she  expressed  by  a  certain  lift  of  the  chin  and  a  fall 
of  the  eyelids  the  absence  of  all  quality  in  her  grand- 
daughter-in-law  as  no  words  could  have  done  it.  I 
suppose  it  will  be  long  before  these  poor  creatures 
will  cease  to  seem  as  if  they  were  playing  at  our  so- 
cial conditions,  or  the  prejudices  and  passions  when 
painted  black  will  seem  otherwise  than  funny.  But 
if  this  old  lady  had  been  born  a  duchess,  or  the  daugh- 
ter of  a  merchant  one  remove  from  retail  trade,  she 
could  not  have  represented  the  unrelenting  dowager 
more  vividly.  She  bore  witness  to  the  blameless  char- 
acter of  the  plaintiff,  to  whom  her  grandson  had  paid 
only  those  attentions  permissible  from  a  gentleman 
unhappy  in  his  marriage  and  living  apart  from  his 
wife  —  a  wife,  she  insinuated,  unworthy  both  before 
and  since  the  union  which  she  had  used  sinister  arts 

57 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

in  forming  with  a  family  every  way  above  her.  She 
did  not  overdo  the  part,  and  she  descended  from  the 
stand  with  the  same  hauteur  toward  the  old  man  who 
succeeded  her  as  she  had  shown  his  daughter. 

The  hapless  sire  —  for  this  was  the  character  he 
attempted  —  came  upon  the  stand  with  his  forsaken 
grandchild  in  his  arms,  and  bore  his  testimony  to  the 
fact  that  his  daughter  was  a  good  girl,  and  had  always 
done  what  was  right,  and  had  been  brought  up  to  it. 
He  dwelt  upon  her  fidelity  to  her  virtuous  family  train- 
ing, with  no  apparent  sense  of  incongruity  in  the  facts 
— elicited  by  counsel- — to  the  contrary;  and  he  was  an 
old  man  whose  perceptions  were  somewhat  blunted  as 
to  other  things.  He  maundered  on  about  his  son-in- 
law's  neglect  of  his  wife  and  child,  and  the  expense 
which  he  had  been  put  to  on  their  account,  and  espe- 
cially about  the  wrongs  his  family  had  suffered  since 
his  son-in-law  "  got  to  going  "  with  the  plaintiff. 

"  You  say,"  interpreted  the  judge,  "  that  the  plain- 
tiff tried  to  seduce  the  affections  of  your  daughter's 
husband  from  her  ?" 

The  old  man  was  brought  to  a  long  and  thoughtful 
pause,  from  which  he  was  startled  by  a  repetition  of 
the  judge's  question.  "  I — I  don'  know  as  I  under- 
stand you,  judge,"  he  faltered. 

"  Do  you  mean  that  the  plaintiff — the  person  whom 
your  daughter  threatened  to  beat — has  been  trying  to 
get  your  daughter's  husband's  affections  away  from 
her?" 

"  Why,  he  hain't  never  showed  her  no  affections, 
judge !  He's  just  left  me  to  support  her." 

"  Very  well,  then.  Has  the  plaintiff  tried  to  get 
your  daughter's  husband  away  from  her?" 

"  I  guess  not,  judge.  He  hain't  never  took  any  no- 
tice of  my  daughter  since  he  married  her." 

"  Well,  does  your  son-in-law  go  with  this  person  ?" 

58 


POLICE    REPORT 

"With  who,  judge?" 

"  With  the  plaintiff." 

"  De  oP  woman  ?  No,  he  don'  go  wid  de  oP  woman 
any:  she's  his  gran'motlier" 

"  Well,  does  he  go  with  the  young  woman  3" 

"  Oh  yes !  Yes !  He  goes  with  the  young  woman. 
Goes  with  her  all  the  time.  That's  the  one  he  goes 
with!" 

He  seemed  to  be  greatly  surprised  and  delighted  to 
find  that  this  point  was  what  the  judge  had  been  try- 
ing to  get  at,  and  the  audience  shared  his  pleasure. 

I  really  forget  how  the  case  was  decided.  Perhaps 
my  train,  which  I  began  to  be  anxious  not  to  lose, 
hurried  me  away  before  the  denouement,  as  often  hap- 
pens with  the  suburban  play-goer.  But  to  one  who 
cares  rather  for  character  than  for  plot  it  made  little 
difference.  I  came  away  thinking  that  if  the  actors 
in  the  little  drama  were  of  another  complexion,  how 
finely  the  situation  would  have  served  in  a  certain 
sort  of  intense  novel;  the  patrician  dowager,  inap- 
peasably  offended  by  the  low  match  her  grandson  has 
made,  and  willing  to  encourage  his  penchant  for  the 
lady  of  his  own  rank,  whom  some  fortuity  may  yet 
enable  him  to  marry:  the  wife,  with  her  vulgar  but 
strong  passions,  stung  to  madness  by  the  neglect  and 
disdain  of  her  husband's  family — it  is  certainly  a  very 
pretty  intrigue,  and  I  commend  it  to  my  brother  (or 
sister)  novelists  who  like  to  be  praised  by  the  review- 
ers for  what  the  reviewers  think  profundity  and  power. 


VIII 

It  was  nearly  a  year  later  that  I  paid  my  second 

visit  to  the  police  court,  on  a  day,  like  the  first,  humid 

59 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

and  dull,  but  very  close  and  suffocatingly  hot.  It  was 
a  Monday  morning,  and  there  was  a  full  dock,  as  I 
have  learned  that  the  prisoner's  pen  at  the  right  of  the 
clerk's  desk  is  called.  The  clerk  was  standing  with 
that  sheaf  of  indictments  in  his  hand,  and  saying, 
"  John  O'Brien !"  and  John  O'Brien  was  answering, 
"  Here,  sor  1"  and  the  clerk  was  proceeding,  "  Com- 
plained of  for  being  drunk  guilty  or  not  guilty  pay  a 
fine  of  one  dollar  and  costs  stand  committed  to  the 
House  of  Industry,"  and  then  writing  on  the  indict- 
ment and  tossing  it  aside.  As  I  modestly  took  my 
stand  at  the  door,  till  I  should  gather  courage  to  cross 
the  room  to  one  of  the  vacant  seats  which  I  saw  among 
the  policemen,  one  of  these  officers  of  the  court  ap- 
proached me  and  said,  "  No  room  for  you  here  to-day, 
my  friend.  Go  up  on  the  Common."  In  spite  of  my 
share  of  that  purely  American  vanity  which  delights 
in  official  recognition,  I  could  not  be  flattered  at  this, 
and  it  was  with  relief  that  I  found  he  was  addressing 
a  fellow-habitue  behind  me.  The  court-room  was,  in 
fact,  very  full,  and  there  were  no  seats  on  the  benches 
ordinarily  allotted  to  spectators;  so  I  at  once  crossed 
to  my  place,  and  sat  down  among  the  policemen,  to 
whom  I  authorized  my  intrusion  by  taking  my  note- 
book from  my  pocket.  I  have  some  hopes  that  the 
spectators  thought  me  a  detective  in  plain  clothes,  and 
revered  me  accordingly.  There  was  such  a  person  near 
me,  with  his  club  sticking  out  of  his  back-pocket,  whom 
I  am  sure  I  revered. 

I  had  not  come  to  report  the  events  of  this  session 
of  the  court,  but  to  refresh  the  impressions  of  my  first 
visit,  and  I  was  glad  to  find  them  so  just.  There  was, 
of  course,  some  little  change;  but  the  same  magistrate 
was  there,  serene,  patient,  mercifully  inclined  of  vis- 
age; the  colored  attorney  was  there,  in  charge,  as  be- 

60 


POLICE    KEPOKT 

fore,  of  a  disastrous  Irish  case.  The  officials  who  tried 
to  keep  order  had  put  off  their  flannel  coats  for  coats 
of  seersucker,  and  each  carried  a  Japanese  fan ;  neither 
wore  a  collar,  now,  and  I  fancied  them  both  a  little 
more  in  flesh.  I  think  they  were  even  less  successful 
than  formerly  in  quelling  disturbances,  though  they 
were  even  more  polished  in  the  terms  of  their  appeal. 
"  Too  much  conversation  in  the  court !"  they  called  out 
to  us  collectively.  "  Conversation  must  cease,"  they 
added.  Then  one,  walking  up  to  a  benchful  of  vol- 
uble witnesses,  would  say,  "'Must  cease  that  conversa- 
tion," and  to  my  fellow-policemen,  "  Less  conversation, 
gentlemen  " ;  then  again  to  the  room  at  large,  "  Stop 
all  conversation  in  the  court,"  and  "  All  conversation 
must  cease  entirely." 

The  Irish  case,  which  presently  came  on,  was  a  ques- 
tion of  assault  and  battery  between  Mrs.  O'Hara  and 
Mrs.  MacMannis;  it  had  finally  to  be  dismissed,  after 
much  testimony  to  the  guilt  and  peaceable  character  of 
both  parties.  A  dozen  or  more  witnesses  were  called, 
principally  young  girls,  who  had  come  in  their  best, 
and  with  whom  one  could  fancy  this  an  occasion  of 
present  satisfying  excitement  and  future  celebrity. 
The  witnesses  were  generally  more  interesting  than 
the  parties  to  the  suits,  I  thought,  and  I  could  not  get 
tired  of  my  fellow-spectators,  I  suppose,  if  I  went  a 
great  many  times.  I  liked  to  consider  the  hungry 
gravity  of  their  countenances,  as  they  listened  to  the 
facts  elicited,  and  to  speculate  as  to  the  ultimate  effect 
upon  their  moral  natures — or  their  immoral  natures 
— of  the  gross  and  palpable  shocks  daily  imparted  to 
them  by  the  details  of  vice  and  crime.  I  have  tried 
to  treat  my  material  lightly  and  entertainingly,  as  a 
true  reporter  should,  but  I  would  not  have  my  reader 
suppose  that  I  did  not  feel  the  essential  cruelty  of  an 

61 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

exhibition  that  tore  its  poor  rags  from  all  that  squalid 
shame,  and  its  mask  from  all  that  lying,  cowering  guilt, 
or  did  not  suspect  how  it  must  harden  and  deprave 
those  whom  it  daily  entertained.  As  I  dwelt  upon  the 
dull  visages  of  the  spectators,  certain  spectacles  vaguely 
related  themselves  to  what  I  saw:  the  women  who  sat 
and  knitted  at  the  sessions  of  the  Revolutionary  tri- 
bunals of  Paris  and  overwhelmed  with  their  clamor 
the  judges'  feeble  impulses  to  mercy;  the  roaring  pop- 
ulace at  the  Spanish  bull-fight  and  the  Roman  arena. 
Here  the  same  elements  were  held  in  absolute  silence — 
debarred  even  from  "  conversation  " — but  it  was  im- 
possible not  to  feel  that  here  in  degree  were  the  con- 
ditions that  trained  men  to  demand  blood,  to  rave  for 
the  guillotine,  to  turn  down  the  thumb.  This  procession 
of  misdeeds,  passing  under  their  eyes  day  after  day, 
must  leave  a  miasm  of  moral  death  behind  it  which  no 
prison  or  workhouse  can  hereafter  cure.  We  all  know 
that  the  genius  of  our  law  is  publicity;  but  it  may 
be  questioned  whether  criminal  trials  may  not  be  as 
profitably  kept  private  as  hangings,  the  popular  at- 
tendance on  which  was  once  supposed  to  be  a  bulwark 
of  religion  and  morality. 

IX 

~Not  that  there  was  any  avoidable  brutality,  or  even 
indecorum,  in  the  conduct  of  the  trials  that  I  saw.  A 
spade  was  necessarily  called  a  spade ;  but  it  seemed  to 
me  that  with  all  the  lapse  of  time  and  foreign  alloy 
the  old  Puritan  seriousness  was  making  itself  felt  even 
here,  and  subduing  the  tone  of  the  procedure  to  a  grave 
decency  consonant  with  the  inquiries  of  justice.  For 
it  was  really  justice  that  was  administered,  so  far  as 

I  could  see;  and  justice  that  was  by  no  means  blind, 

62 


POLICE    EEPOKT 

but  very  open-eyed  and  keen-sighted.  The  causes  were 
decided  by  one  man,  from  evidence  usually  extracted 
out  of  writhing  reluctance  or  abysmal  stupidity,  and 
the  judgment  must  be  formed  and  the  sentence  given 
where  the  magistrate  sat,  amid  the  confusion  of  the 
crowded  room.  Yet,  except  in  the  case  of  my  poor 
thief,  I  did  not  see  him  hesitate;  and  I  did  not  doubt 
his  wisdom  even  in  that  case.  His  decisions  seemed  to 
me  the  result  of  most  patient  and  wonderfully  rapid 
cogitation,  and  in  dealing  with  the  witnesses  he  never 
lost  his  temper  amid  densities  of  dulness  which  it  is 
quite  impossible  to  do  more  than  indicate.  If  it  were 
necessary,  for  example,  to  establish  the  fact  that  a 
handkerchief  was  white,  it  was  not  to  be  done  with- 
out some  such  colloquy  as  this : 

"  Was  it  a  white  handkerchief  ?" 

"Sort" 

"  Was  the  handkerchief  white  2" 

"  Was  it  white,  sor  ?" 

"  Yes,  was  it  white  ?" 

"  Was  what  white,  sor  ?" 

"  The  handkerchief — was  the  handkerchief  white  ?" 

"  What  handkerchief,  sor  ?" 

"  The  handkerchief  you  just  mentioned — the  hand- 
kerchief that  the  defendant  dropped." 

"  I  didn't  see  it,  sor." 

"  Didn't  see  the  handkerchief  ?" 

"  Didn't  see  him  drop  it,  sor." 

"  Well,  did  you  see  the  handkerchief  2" 

"  The  handkerchief,  sor  ?  Oh  yes,  sor !  I  saw  it — 
I  saw  the  handkerchief." 

"Well,  was  it  white f» 

*'  It  was,  sor." 

A  boy  who  complained  of  another  for  assaulting  him 

said  that  he  knocked  him  down. 

63 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

"  How  did  he  knock  you  down  ?"  asked  the  judge. 
"Did  he  knock  you  down  with  his  fist  or  his  open 
hand?" 

"  Yes,  sor." 

"Which  did  he  do  it  with?" 

"  Put  his  arms  round  me  and  knocked  me  down." 

"  Then  he  didn't  Tcnock  you  down.  He  threw  you 
down." 

"  Yes,  sor.  He  didn't  t'row  me  down.  Put  his  arms 
round  me  and  knocked  me  down." 

It  would  be  impossible  to  caricature  these  things,  or 
to  exaggerate  the  charitable  long-suffering  that  dealt 
with  such  cases.  Sometimes,  as  if  in  mere  despair,  the 
judge  called  the  parties  to  him  and  questioned  them 
privately;  after  which  the  case  seemed  to  be  settled 
without  further  trial. 


I  have  spoken  of  the  theatrical  illusion  which  the  pro- 
ceedings of  the  court  produced ;  but  it  often  seemed  to 
me  also  like  a  school  where  bad  boys  and  girls  were 
brought  up  for  punishment.  They  were,  indeed,  like 
children,  those  poor  offenders,  and  had  a  sort  of  inno- 
cent simplicity  in  their  wickedness,  as  good  people 
have  in  their  goodness.  One  case  came  up  on  the 
occasion  of  my  last  visit,  which  I  should  like  to  report 
verbatim  in  illustration,  but  it  was  of  too  lurid  a  sort 
to  be  treated  by  native  realism ;  we  can  only  bear  that 
sort  when  imported;  and  undoubtedly  there  is  some- 
thing still  to  be  said  in  behalf  of  decency,  at  least  in 
the  English  language.  I  can  only  hint  that  this  case 
was  one  which  in  some  form  or  other  has  been  coming 
up  in  the  police  courts  ever  since  police  courts  began. 

It  must  have  been  familiar  to  those  of  Thebes  three 

64 


POLICE    KEPOKT 

thousand  years  ago,  and  will  be  so  in  those  of  cities 
which  shall  look  back  on  Boston  in  an  antiquity  as 
hoary.  A  hard-working  old  fool  with  a  month's  pay 
in  his  pocket  and  the  lost  soul  with  whom  he  carouses ; 
the  theft ;  the  quarrel  between  the  lost  soul  and  the  yet 
more  fallen  spirit  who  harbored  her  and  traded  at 
second-hand  in  her  perdition  as  to  who  stole  the  fool's 
money, — what  stale  materials !  Yet  I  was  as  much  in- 
terested as  if  this  were  the  first  case  of  the  kind,  and, 
confronted  with  the  fool  and  the  lost  soul  and  the  yet 
more  fallen  spirit,  I  could  not  feel  that  they  were — 
let  me  say  it  in  all  seriousness  and  reverence — so  very 
bad.  Perhaps  it  was  because  they  stood  there  reduced 
to  the  very  nakedness  of  their  shame,  and  confessedly 
guilty  in  what  human  nature  struggles  to  the  last  to 
deny — stood  there,  as  a  premise,  far  past  the  hope  of 
lying — that  they  seemed  rather  subjects  for  pity  than 
abhorrence.  The  fool  and  the  lost  soul  were  light  and 
trivial ;  they  even  laughed  at  some  of  the  grosser  facts ; 
but  that  yet  more  fallen  spirit  was  ghastly  tragical,  as 
bit  by  bit  the  confession  of  her  business  was  torn  from 
her;  it  was  torture  that  seemed  hideously  out  of  pro- 
portion to  any  end  to  be  attained ;  yet  as  things  are  it 
had  to  be.  If  then  and  there  some  sort  of  redemption 
might  have  begun ! 

The  divine  life  which  is  in  these  poor  creatures,  as 
in  the  best  and  purest,  seemeol  to  be  struggling  back 
to  some  relation  and  likeness  to  our  average  sinful 
humanity,  insisting  that  if  socially  and  publicly  we 
denied  it  we  should  not  hold  it  wholly  outcast  in  our 
secret  hearts,  nor  refuse  it  our  sympathy.  Seeing  that 
on  their  hopelessly  sunken  level  their  common  human- 
ity kept  that  symmetry  and  proportion  which  physical 
deformity  shows,  one  could  not  doubt  that  a  distorted 

kindliness  and  good-nature  remained  to  them  in  the 

65 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

midst  of  their  depravity:  the  man  was  like  a  gray- 
headed,  foolish  boy;  the  two  women  as  simple  and 
cunning  as  two  naughty  children.  It  could  be  imag- 
ined that  they  had  their  friendly  moments;  that  in 
extremity  they  might  care  for  each  other;  that  even 
such  a  life  as  theirs  had  its  reliefs  from  perdition,  as 
in  disease  there  is  relief  from  pain,  and  no  suffering, 
out  of  romance,  is  incessant.  They  had  certainly  their 
decorums,  their  criterions.  On  their  plane,  everything 
but  the  theft  and  the  noisy  quarrel  was  of  custom  and 
for  granted;  but  these  were  misdemeanors  and  dis- 
graceful. Like  another  hostess  of  the  sort,  the  fallen 
spirit  was  aggrieved  at  these.  "  Do  you  think  I  keep 
thieves  in  my  house?  .  .  .  The  tithe  of  a  hair  was 
never  lost  in  my  house  before.  .  .  .  I'll  no  swaggerers. 
.  .  .  There  comes  no  swaggering  here.  ...  I  will  bar 
no  honest  man  my  house,  nor  no  cheater;  but  I  do 
not  love  swaggering."  This  is  the  sum  of  what  she 
said  that  she  had  said  in  rebuke  of  the  lost  soul;  that 
thieving  and  that  swaggering,  they  incensed  her,  and 
roused  in  her  all  the  instincts  of  a  moral  and  respect- 
able person.  Humanity  adjusts  itself  to  all  conditions, 
and  doubtless  God  forsakes  it  in  none,  but  still  shapes 
it  to  some  semblance  of  health  in  its  sickness,  of  order 
in  its  disorder,  of  righteousness  in  its  sin. 

I  dare  say  that  it  was  not  a  wholesome  feeling, 
this  leniency  that  acquaintance  with  sinners  produces. 
There  is  much  to  be  urged  on  that  side,  and  I  would 
like  to  urge  it  in  considering  the  effect  of  daily  attend- 
ance at  the  police  court  upon  these  spectators  whom 
I  have  tried  to  study  for  the  reader's  advantage.  I 
must  own  that  the  trial  at  which  I  have  hinted  did  not 
affect  them  seriously,  and  I  doubt  if  they  psychologized 
upon  it.  They  craned  their  necks  forward  and  gloated 
on  those  women  with  an  unmistakably  obscene  delight. 

66 


POLICE    EEPOKT 

If  they  were  not  beyond  being  the  worse  for  anything, 
they  were  the  worse  for  that  trial.  Why  were  they 
present?  Theoretically,  perhaps,  to  see  that  justice 
was  done.  But  if  justice  had  not  been  done,  how 
could  they  have  helped  it?  The  public  shame  seemed 
purely  depraving  both  to  those  who  suffered  it  and  to 
those  who  saw  it,  and  it  ought  to  have  been  no  part 
of  the  punishment  inflicted.  It  was  horrible,  and  it 
sometimes  befell  those  who  were  accused  of  nothing, 
but  were  merely  there  to  be  tortured  as  witnesses.  The 
lawyer  who  forced  that  wretched  hostess  to  confess  the 
character  of  her  house  used  no  unfair  means,  and  he 
dealt  with  her  as  sparingly  as  he  might;  yet  it  was 
still  a  shocking  spectacle;  for  she  was,  curiously 
enough,  not  lost  to  shame,  but  most  alive  to  it,  and, 
standing  there  before  that  brutal  crowd,  gave  up  her 
name  to  infamy,  with  atrocious  pain  and  hate;  her 
face  was  such  a  visage  as  hell-fire  might  flash  into 
sight  among  the  newly  damned,  but  such  as  our  fa- 
miliar and  respectable  sunlight  would  do  well  not  to 
reveal  to  any  eyes  but  magistrates'  and  priests'.  Till 
one  has  seen  such  a  thing  it  is  incredible  that  it  should 
be,  and  then  incredible  that  it  should  possibly  be  of 
daily  occurrence.  It  was  as  if  the  physicians  in  charge 
of  a  public  hospital  should  permit  that  rabble  to  be 
present  at  a  clinique  for  some  loathsome  disease,  to 
see  that  there  was  no  malpractice.  If  the  whole  trial 
could  have  taken  place  with  closed  doors,  and  with 
none  present  but  the  parties,  the  lawyers,  and  the  court, 
what  possible  harm  could  have  been  done?  I  think 
none  whatever,  and  I  am  so  sure  of  this  that  I  would 
not  only  have  all  the  police  trials  secret,  but  I  would 
never  have  another  police  report  in  print — after  this! 
Then  the  decency  of  mystery,  and  perhaps  something 
of  its  awe,  would  surround  the  vulgar  shame  and  terror 
6  67 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

of  the  police  court,  and  a  system  which  does  no  good 
would  at  least  do  less  harm  than  at  present. 


XI 


It  will  be  perceived  that,  like  all  reformers,  I  am 
going  too  far.  I  begin  with  demanding  secrecy  in 
police  trials,  and  I  end  by  suggesting  that  they  be 
abolished  altogether.  But,  in  fact,  nothing  struck  me 
more  forcibly  in  the  proceedings  of  the  police  court 
than  their  apparent  futility.  It  was  all  a  mere  sup- 
pression of  symptoms  in  the  vicious  classes,  not  a  cure. 
This  one  or  that  one  would  not  steal,  or  assault  and 
batter,  for  the  given  term  of  his  imprisonment,  but  this 
was  ludicrously  far  from  touching  even  the  tendency  to 
theft  and  violence.  These  bad  boys  and  girls  came  up 
and  had  their  thrashing  or  their  rap  over  the  knuckles, 
and  were  practically  bidden  by  the  conditions  of  our 
civilization  to  go  and  sin  some  more.  Perhaps  there 
is  no  cure  for  vice  and  crime.  Perhaps  there  is  noth- 
ing but  prevention,  in  the  application  of  which  there 
is  always  difficulty,  obscurity,  and  uncertainty. 

The  other  day,  as  I  passed  the  court-house,  that  sad 
vehicle  which  is  called  the  Black  Maria  was  driving 
away  from  the  high  portal  into  which  it  backs  to  re- 
ceive its  dead.  The  word  came  inevitably ;  it  is  not 
so  far  wrong,  and  it  may  stand.)  The  Black  Maria 
may  still  be  Maria  (the  reason  why  it  should  ever  have 
been  I  do  not  know),  but  it  is  black  no  longer.  On 
the  contrary,  it  is  painted  a  not  uncheerful  salmon 
color,  with  its  false  sash  picked  out  in  drab;  and  at 
first  glance,  among  the  rattling  express-wagons,  it  look- 
ed not  unlike  an  omnibus  of  the  living,  and  could 
have  passed  through  the  street  without  making  the 

68 


POLICE    KEPORT 

casual  observer  realize  what  a  dreary  hearse  it  was.  I 
dare  say  it  was  on  its  way  to  the  House  of  Industry, 
or  the  House  of  Correction,  or  Deer  Island,  or  some 
of  those  places  where  people  are  put  to  go  from  bad 
to  worse ;  and  it  was  fulfilling  its  function  with  a  mer- 
ciful privacy,  for  its  load  of  convicts  might  have  been 
dragged  through  the  streets  on  open  hurdles  for  the 
further  edification  of  the  populace.  Yet  I  could  not 
help  thinking — or  perhaps  the  thought  only  occurs  to 
me  now — that  for  all  reasonable  hope  as  to  the  future 
of  its  inmates  the  Black  Maria  might  as  well  have  been 
fitted  with  one  of  those  ingenious  pieces  of  mechanism 
sometimes  employed  by  the  Enemies  of  Society,  and 
driven  out  to  some  wide,  open  space  where  the  explo- 
sion could  do  no  harm  to  the  vicinity,  and  so  when 
the  horses  and  driver  had  removed  to  a  safe  distance — 

But  this  is  perhaps  pessimism. 

It  is  very  hard  to  say  what  pessimism  really  is,  and 
almost  any  honest  expression  concerning  the  monoto- 
nous endeavor  and  failure  of  society  to  repress  the 
monotonous  evolution  of  the  criminal  in  conditions 
that  render  his  evolution  inevitable  must  seem  pessi- 
mistic. I  do  not  suppose  that  we  ought  to  kill  him 
merely  because  we  cannot  hope  to  cure  him,  though 
society  goes  to  this  extreme  in  certain  extreme  cases. 
Is  it  right  to  kill  the  criminal  at  one  stage  of  his  ca- 
reer, and  not  at  another?  After  the  first  conviction 
the  rest  is  inevitable,  and  each  succeeding  conviction 
follows  as  a  matter  of  course.  A  bleaker  pessimist  than 
myself  might  say  that  all  criminal  courts  seem  to  be 
part  of  the  process  in  the  evolution  of  the  criminal. 
Still,  criminal  courts  must  be. 


I   TALK   OF   DKEAMS 

BUT  it  is  mostly  my  own  dreams  I  talk  of,  and  that 
will  somewhat  excuse  me  for  talking  of  dreams  at  all. 
Every  one  knows  how  delightful  the  dreams  are  that 
one  dreams  one's  self,  and  how  insipid  the  dreams  of 
others  are.  I  had  an  illustration  of  the  fact,  not  many 
evenings  ago,  when  a  company  of  us  got  telling  dreams. 
I  had  by  far  the  best  dreams  of  any ;  to  be  quite  frank, 
mine  were  the  only  dreams  worth  listening  to ;  they 
were  richly  imaginative,  delicately  fantastic,  exquisite- 
ly whimsical,  and  humorous  in  the  last  degree;  and  I 
wondered  that  when  the  rest  could  have  listened  to 
them  they  were  always  eager  to  cut  in  with  some 
silly,  senseless,  tasteless  thing  that  made  me  sorry 
and  ashamed  for  them.  I  shall  not  be  going  too  far 
if  I  say  that  it  was  on  their  part  the  grossest  betrayal 
of  vanity  that  I  ever  witnessed. 

.But  the  egotism  of  some  people  concerning  their 
dreams  is  almost  incredible.  They  will  come  down  to 
breakfast  and  bore  everybody  with  a  recital  of  the  non- 
sense that  has  passed  through  their  brains  in  sleep,  as 
if  they  were  not  bad  enough  when  they  were  awake; 
they  will  not  spare  the  slightest  detail;  and  if,  by  the 
mercy  of  Heaven,  they  have  forgotten  something,  they 
will  be  sure  to  recollect  it,  and  go  back  and  give  it  all 
over  again  with  added  circumstance.  Such  people  do 
not  reflect  that  there  is  something  so  purely  and  in- 
tensely personal  in  dreams  that  they  can  rarely  interest 

70 


I    TALK    OF    DKEAMS 

any  one  but  the  dreamer,  and  that  to  the  dearest  friend, 
the  closest  relation  or  connection,  they  can  seldom  be 
otherwise  than  tedious  and  impertinent.  The  habit 
husbands  and  wives  have  of  making  each  other  listen 
to  their  dreams  is  especially  cruel.  They  have  each 
other  quite  helpless,  and  for  this  reason  they  should 
all  the  more  carefully  guard  themselves  from  abusing 
their  advantage.  Parents  should  not  afflict  their  off- 
spring with  the  rehearsal  of  their  mental  maunderings 
in  sleep,  and  children  should  learn  that  one  of  the  first 
duties  a  child  owes  its  parents  is  to  spare  them  the 
anguish  of  hearing  what  it  has  dreamed  about  over- 
night. A  like  forbearance  in  regard  to  the  community 
at  large  should  be  taught  as  the  first  trait  of  good  man- 
ners in  the  public  schools,  if  we  ever  come  to  teach  good 
manners  there. 


Certain  exceptional  dreams,  however,  are  so  im- 
peratively significant,  so  vitally  important,  that  it 
would  be  wrong  to  withhold  them  from  the  knowledge 
of  those  who  happened  not  to  dream  them,  and  I  feel 
some  such  quality  in  my  own  dreams  so  strongly  that 
I  could  scarcely  forgive  myself  if  I  did  not,  however 
briefly,  impart  them.  It  was  only  the  last  week,  for 
instance,  that  I  found  myself  one  night  in  the  com- 
pany of  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  the  great  Duke,  the 
Iron  one,  in  fact;  and  after  a  few  moments  of  agree- 
able conversation  on  topics  of  interest  among  gentle- 
men, his  Grace  said  that  now,  if  I  pleased,  he  would 
like  a  couple  of  those  towels.  We  had  not  been  speak- 
ing of  towels,  that  I  remember,  but  it  seemed  the  most 
natural  thing  in  the  world  that  he  should  mention  them 
in  the  connection,  whatever  it  was,  and  I  went  at  once 

71 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

to  get  them  for  him.  At  the  place  where  they  gave  out 
towels,  and  where  I  found  some  very  civil  people,  they 
told  me  that  what  I  wanted  was  not  towels,  and  they 
gave  me  instead  two  bath-gowns,  of  rather  scanty  meas- 
ure, butternut  in  color  and  Turkish  in  texture.  The 
garments  made  somehow  a  very  strong  impression  upon 
me,  so  that  I  could  draw  them  now,  if  I  could  draw 
anything,  as  they  looked  when  they  were  held  up  to 
me.  At  the  same  moment,  for  no  reason  that  I  can 
allege,  I  passed  from  a  social  to  a  menial  relation  to 
the  Duke,  and  foresaw  that  when  I  went  back  to  him 
with  those  bath-gowns  he  would  not  thank  me  as  one 
gentleman  would  another,  but  would  offer  me  a  tip 
as  if  I  were  a  servant.  This  gave  me  no  trouble,  for 
I  at  once  dramatized  a  little  scene  between  myself  and 
the  Duke,  in  which  I  should  bring  him  the  bath-gowns, 
and  he  should  offer  me  the  tip,  and  I  should  refuse  it 
with  a  low  bow,  and  say  that  I  was  an  American. 
What  I  did  not  dramatize,  or  what  seemed  to  enter 
into  the  dialogue  quite  without  my  agency,  was  the 
Duke's  reply  to  my  proud  speech.  It  was  foreshown 
me  that  he  would  say,  He  did  not  see  why  that  should 
make  any  difference.  I  suppose  it  was  in  the  hurt  I 
felt  at  this  wound  to  our  national  dignity  that  I  now 
instantly  invented  the  society  of  some  ladies,  whom  I 
told  of  my  business  with  those  bath-gowns  (I  still  had 
them  in  my  hands),  and  urged  them  to  go  with  me  and 
call  upon  the  Duke.  They  expressed,  somehow,  that 
they  would  rather  not,  and  then  I  urged  that  the  Duke 
was  very  handsome.  This  seemed  to  end  the  whole 
affair,  and  I  passed  on  to  other  visions,  which  I  cannot 
recall. 

I  have  not  often  had  a  dream  of  such  international 
import,  in  the  offence  offered  through  me  to  the  Amer- 
ican character  and  its  well-known  superiority  to  tips, 

72 


I    TALK    OF    DREAMS 

but  I  have  had  others  quite  as  humiliating  to  me  per- 
sonally. In  fact,  I  am  rather  in  the  habit  of  having 
such  dreams,  and  I  think  I  may  not  unjustly  attribute 
to  them  the  disciplined  modesty  which  the  reader  will 
hardly  fail  to  detect  in  the  present  essay.  It  has  more 
than  once  been  my  fate  to  find  myself  during  sleep  in 
battle,  where  I  behave  with  so  little  courage  as  to  bring 
discredit  upon  our  flag  and  shame  upon  myself.  In 
these  circumstances  I  am  not  anxious  to  make  even  a 
showing  of  courage;  my  one  thought  is  to  get  away  as 
rapidly  and  safely  as  possible.  It  is  said  that  this  is 
really  the  wish  of  all  novices  under  fire,  and  that  the 
difference  between  a  hero  and  a  coward  is  that  the  hero 
hides  it,  with  a  duplicity  which  finally  does  him  honor, 
and  that  the  coward  frankly  runs  away.  I  have  never 
really  been  in  battle,  and  if  it  is  anything  like  a  battle 
in  dreams  I  would  not  willingly  qualify  myself  to 
speak  by  the  card  on  this  point.  Neither  have  I  ever 
really  been  upon  the  stage,  but  in  dreams  I  have  often 
been  there,  and  always  in  a  great  trouble  of  mind  at 
not  knowing  my  part.  It  seems  a  little  odd  that  I 
should  not  sometimes  be  prepared,  but  I  never  am,  and 
I  feel  that  when  the  curtain  rises  I  shall  be  disgraced 
beyond  all  reprieve.  I  dare  say  it  is  the  suffering  from 
this  that  awakens  me  in  time,  or  changes  the  current 
of  my  dreams  so  that  I  have  never  yet  been  actually 
hooted  from  the  stage. 


II 


But  I  do  not  so  much  object  to  these  ordeals  as  to 
some  social  experiences  which  I  have  in  dreams.  I 
cannot  understand  why  one  should  dream  of  being 

slighted  or  snubbed  in  society,  but  this  is  what  I  have 

73 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

done  more  than  once,  though  never  perhaps  so  signally 
as  in  the  instance  I  am  about  to  give.  I  found  myself 
in  a  large  room,  where  people  were  sitting  at  lunch  or 
supper  around  small  tables,  as  is  the  custom,  I  am  told, 
at  parties  in  the  houses  of  our  nobility  and  gentry.  I 
was  feeling  very  well;  not  too  proud,  I  hope,  but  in 
harmony  with  the  time  and  place.  I  was  very  well 
dressed,  for  me;  and  as  I  stood  talking  to  some  ladies 
at  one  of  the  tables  I  was  saying  some  rather  brilliant 
things,  for  me ;  I  lounged  easily  on  one  foot,  as  I  have 
observed  men  of  fashion  do,  and  as  I  talked,  I  flipped 
my  gloves,  which  I  held  in  one  hand,  across  the  other; 
I  remember  thinking  that  this  was  a  peculiarly  dis- 
tinguished action.  Upon  the  whole  I  comported  my- 
self like  one  in  the  habit  of  such  affairs,  and  I  turned 
to  walk  away  to  another  table,  very  well  satisfied  with 
myself  and  with  the  effect  of  my  splendor  upon  the 
ladies.  But  I  had  got  only  a  few  paces  off  when  I 
perceived  (I  could  not  see  with  my  back  turned)  one 
of  the  ladies  lean  forward,  and  heard  her  say  to  the 
rest  in  a  tone  of  killing  condescension  and  patron- 
age :  "  I  don't  see  why  that  person  isn't  as  well  as 
another." 

I  say  that  I  do  not  like  this  sort  of  dreams,  and  I 
never  would  have  them  if  I  could  help.  They  make 
me  ask  myself  if  I  am  really  such  a  snob  when  I  am 
waking,  and  this  in  itself  is  very  unpleasant.  If  I  am, 
I  cannot  help  hoping  that  it  will  not  be  found  out ;  and 
in  my  dreams  I  am  always  less  sorry  for  the  misdeeds 
I  commit  than  for  their  possible  discovery.  I  have 
done  some  very  bad  things  in  dreams  which  I  have  no 
concern  for  whatever,  except  as  they  seem  to  threaten 
me  with  publicity  or  bring  me  within  the  penalty  of 
the  law;  and  I  believe  this  is  the  attitude  of  most 

other  criminals,  remorse  being  a  fiction  of  the  poets, 

74 


I    TALK    OF    DREAMS 

according  to  the  students  of  the  criminal  class.  It  is 
not  agreeable  to  bring  this  home  to  one's  self,  but  the 
fact  is  not  without  its  significance  in  another  direction. 
It  implies  that  both  in  the  case  of  the  dream-criminal 
and  the  deed-criminal  there  is  perhaps  the  same  taint 
of  insanity;  only  in  the  deed-criminal  it  is  active,  and 
in  the  dream-criminal  it  is  passive.  In  both,  the  in- 
hibitory clause  that  forbids  evil  is  off,  but  the  dreamer 
is  not  bidden  to  do  evil  as  the  maniac  is,  or  as  the 
malefactor  often  seems  to  be.  The  dreamer  is  purely 
unmoral ;  good  and  bad  are  the  same  to  his  conscience ; 
he  has  no  more  to  do  with  right  and  wrong  than  the 
animals;  he  is  reduced  to  the  state  of  the  merely  nat- 
ural man;  and  perhaps  the  primitive  men  were  really 
like  what  we  all  are  now  in  our  dreams.  Perhaps  all 
life  to  them  was  merely  dreaming,  and  they  never  had 
anything  like  our  waking  consciousness,  which  seems 
to  be  the  offspring  of  conscience,  <  or  else  the  parent  of 
it.  Until  men  passed  the  first  stage  of  being,  perhaps 
that  which  we  call  the  soul,  for  want  of  a  better  name, 
or  a  worse,  could  hardly  have  existed,  and  perhaps  in 
dreams  the  soul  is  mostly  absent  now.  The  soul,  or 
the  principle  that  we  call  the  soul,  is  the  supernal 
criticism  of  the  deeds  done  in  the  body,  which  goes 
perpetually  on  in  the  waking  mind.  While  this 
watches,  and  warns  or  commands,  we  go  right;  but 
when  it  is  off  duty  we  go  neither  right  nor  wrong,  but 
are  as  the  beasts  that  perish. 

A  common  theory  is  that  the  dreams  which  we  re- 
member are  those  we  have  in  the  drowse  which  pre- 
cedes sleeping  and  waking;  but  I  do  not  altogether 
accept  this  theory.  In  fact,  there  is  very  little  proof 
of  it.  We  often  wake  from  a  dream,  literally,  but 
there  is  no  proof  that  we  did  not  dream  in  the  middle 

of  the  night  the  dream  which  is  quite  as  vividly  with 

75 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

us  in  the  morning  as  the  one  we  wake  from.  I  should 
think  that  the  dream  which  has  some  color  of  con- 
science in  it  was  the  drowse-dream,  and  that  the  dream 
which  has  none  is  the  sleep-dream;  and  I  believe  that 
the  most  of  our  dreams  will  be  found  by  this  test  to 
be  sleep-dreams.  It  is  in  these  we  may  know  what 
we  would  be  without  our  soiils,  without  their  supernal 
criticism  of  the  mind ;  for  the  mind  keeps  on  working 
in  them,  with  the  lights  of  waking  knowledge,  both 
experience  and  observation,  but  ruthlessly,  remorse- 
lessly. By  them  we  may  know  what  the  state  of  the 
habitual  criminal  is,  what  the  state  of  the  lunatic,  the 
animal,  the  devil  is.  In  them  the  personal  character 
ceases ;  the  dreamer  is  remanded  to  his  type. 


Ill 

It  is  very  strange,  in  the  matter  of  dreadful  dreams, 
how  the  body  of  the  terror  is,  in  the  course  of  often 
dreaming,  reduced  to  a  mere  convention.  For  a  long 
time  I  was  tormented  with  a  nightmare  of  burglars, 
and  at  first  I  used  to  dramatize  the  whole  affair  in  de- 
tail, from  the  time  the  burglars  approached  the  house 
till  they  mounted  the  stairs  and  the  light  of  their  dark- 
lanterns  shone  under  the  door  into  my  room.  Now 
I  have  blue-pencilled  all  that  introductory  detail;  I 
have  a  light  shining  in  under  my  door  at  once ;  I  know 
that  it  is  my  old  burglars;  and  I  have  the  effect  of 
nightmare  without  further  ceremony.  There  are  other 
nightmares  that  still  cost  me  a  great  deal  of  trouble 
in  their  construction,  as,  for  instance,  the  nightmare  of 
clinging  to  the  face  of  a  precipice  or  the  eaves  of  a 
lofty  building;  I  have  to  take  as  much  pains  with  the 

arrangement  of  these  as  if  I  were  now  dreaming  them 

76 


I    TALK    OF    DKEAMS 

for  the  first  time  and  were  hardly  more  than  an  ap- 
prentice in  the  business. 

Perhaps  the  most  universal  dream  of  all  is  that  dis- 
graceful dream  of  appearing  in  public  places  and  in 
society  with  very  little  or  nothing  on.  This  dream 
spares  neither  age  nor  sex,  I  believe,  and  I  dare  say 
the  innocency  of  wordless  infancy  is  abused  by  it  and 
dotage  pursued  to  the  tomb.  I  have  not  the  least  doubt 
Adam  and  Eve  had  it  in  Eden ;  though,  up  to  the  mo- 
ment the  fig-leaf  came  in,  it  is  difficult  to  imagine  just 
what  plight  they  found  themselves  in  that  seemed  im- 
proper; probably  there  was  some  plight.  The  most 
amusing  thing  about  this  dream  is  the  sort  of  defen- 
sive process  that  goes  on  in  the  mind  in  search  of  self- 
justification  or  explanation.  Is  there  not  some  peculiar 
circumstance  or  special  condition  in  whose  virtue  it 
is  wholly  right  and  proper  for  one  to  come  to  a  fash- 
ionable assembly  clad  simply  in  a  towel,  or  to  go  about 
the  street  in  nothing  but  a  pair  of  kid  gloves,  or  of 
pajamas  at  the  most?  This,  or  something  like  it,  the 
mind  of  the  dreamer  struggles  to  establish,  with  a  good 
deal  of  anxious  appeal  to  the  bystanders  and  a  final 
sense  of  the  hopelessness  of  the  cause. 

One  may  easily  laugh  off  this  sort  of  dream  in  the 
morning,  but  there  are  other  shameful  dreams  whose 
inculpation  projects  itself  far  into  the  day,  and  whose 
infamy  often  lingers  about  one  till  lunch-time.  Every 
one,  nearly,  has  had  them,  but  it  is  not  the  kind  of 
dream  that  any  one  is  fond  of  telling:  the  gross  vanity 
of  the  most  besotted  dream-teller  keeps  that  sort  back. 
During  the  forenoon,  at  least,  the  victim  goes  about 
with  the  dim  question  whether  he  is  not  really  that 
kind  of  man  harassing  him,  and  a  sort  of  remote  fear 
that  he  may  be.  I  fancy  that  as  to  his  nature  and  as 

to  his  mind  he  is  so,  and  that  but  for  the  supernal 

77 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

criticism,  but  for  his  soul,  he  might  be  that  kind  of 
man  in  very  act  and  deed. 

The  dreams  we  sometimes  have  about  other  people 
are  not  without  a  curious  suggestion;  and  the  super- 
stitious (of  those  superstitious  who  like  to  invent  their 
own  superstitions)  might  very  well  imagine  that  the 
persons  dreamed  of  had  a  witting  complicity  in  their 
facts,  as  well  as  the  dreamer.  This  is  a  conjecture 
that  must,  of  course,  not  be  forced  to  any  conclusion. 
One  must  not  go  to  one  of  these  persons  and  ask, 
however  much  one  would  like  to  ask :  "  Sir,  have  you 
no  recollection  of  such  and  such  a  thing,  at  such  and 
such  a  time  and  place,  which  happened  to  us  in  my 
dream?"  Any  such  person  would  be  fully  justified 
in  not  answering  the  question.  It  would  be,  of  all 
interviewing,  the  most  intolerable  •  species.  Yet  a  sin- 
gular interest,  a  curiosity  not  altogether  indefensible, 
will  attach  to  these  persons  in  the  dreamer's  mind,  and 
he  will  not  be  without  the  sense,  ever  after,  that  he 
and  they  have  a  secret  in  common.  This  is  dreadful, 
but  the  only  thing  that  I  can  think  to  do  about  it  is 
to  urge  people  to  keep  out  of  other  people's  dreams 
by  every  means  in  their  power. 


IV 

There  are  things  in  dreams  very  awful,  whicfi  would 
not  be  at  all  so  in  waking — quite  witless  and  aimless 
things,  which  at  the  time  were  of  such  baleful  effect 
that  it  remains  forever.  I  remember  dreaming  when 
I  was  quite  a  small  boy,  not  more  than  ten  years  old, 
a  dream  which  is  vivider  in  my  mind  now  than  any- 
thing that  happened  at  the  time.  I  suppose  it  came 

remotely  from  my  reading  of  certain  "  Tales  of  the  Gro- 

78 


I    TALK    OF    DKEAMS 

tesque  and  the  Arabesque,"  which  had  just  then  fallen 
into  my  hands ;  and  it  involved  simply  an  action  of  the 
fire-company  in  the  little  town  where  I  lived.  They 
were  working  the  brakes  of  the  old  fire-engine,  which 
would  seldom  respond  to  their  efforts,  and  as  their 
hands  rose  and  fell  they  set  up  the  heart-shaking  and 
soul  -  desolating  cry  of  "  Arms  Poe !  arms  Poe !  arms 
Poe!"  This  and  nothing  more  was  the  body  of  my 
horror;  and  if  the  reader  is  not  moved  by  it  the  fault 
is  his  and  not  mine ;  for  I  can  assure  him  that  nothing 
in  my  experience  had  been  more  dreadful  to  me. 

I  can  hardly  except  the  dismaying  apparition  of  a 
clown  whom  I  once  saw,  somewhat  later  in  life,  rise 
through  the  air  in  a  sitting  posture  and  float  lightly 
over  the  house-roof,  snapping  his  fingers  and  vaguely 
smiling,  while  the  antenna?  on  his  forehead,  which 
clowns  have  in  common  with  some  other  insects,  nod- 
ded elasticity.  I  do  not  know  why  this  portent  should 
have  been  so  terrifying,  or  indeed  that  it  was  a  portent 
at  all,  for  nothing  ever  came  of  it;  what  I  know  is 
that  it  was  to  the  last  degree  threatening  and  awful. 
I  never  got  anything  but  joy  out  of  the  circuses  where 
this  dream  must  have  originated,  but  the  pantomime 
of  "  Don  Giovanni,"  which  I  saw  at  the  theatre,  was  as 
grewsome  to  me  waking  as  it  was  to  me  dreaming.  The 
statue  of  the  Commendatore,  in  getting  down  from  his 
horse  to  pursue  the  wicked  hero  (I  think  that  is  what 
he  gets  down  for),  set  an  example  by  which  a  long 
line  of  statues  afterward  profited  in  my  dreams.  For 
many  years,  and  I  do  not  know  but  quite  up  to  the 
time  when  I  adopted  burglars  as  the  theme  of  my 
nightmares,  I  was  almost  always  chased  by  a  marble 
statue  with  an  uplifted  arm,  and  almost  always  I  ran 
along  the  verge  of  a  pond  to  escape  it.  I  believe  that 

I  got  this  pond  out  of  my  remote  childhood,  and  that 

79 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

it  may  have  been  a  fish-pond  embowered  by  weeping- 
willows  which  I  used  to  admire  in  the  door-yard  of  a 
neighbor.  I  have  somehow  a  greater  respect  for  the 
material  of  this  earlier  nightmare  than  I  have  for  that 
of  the  later  ones,  and  no  doubt  the  reader  will  agree 
with  me  that  it  is  much  more  romantic  to  be  pursued 
by  a  statue  than  to  be  threatened  by  burglars.  It  is 
but  a  few  hours  ago,  however,  that  I  saved  myself 
from  these  inveterate  enemies  by  waking  up  just  in 
time  for  breakfast.  They  did  not  come  with  that  light 
of  the  dark-lanterns  shining  under  the  door,  or  I  should 
have  known  them  at  once,  and  not  had  so  much  bother ; 
but  they  intimated  their  presence  in  the  catch  of  the 
lock,  which  would  not  close  securely,  and  there  was 
some  question  at  first  whether  they  were  not  ghosts. 
I  thought  of  tying  the  door-knob  on  the  inside  of  my 
room  to  my  bedpost  (a  bedpost  that  has  not  been  in 
existence  for  fifty  years),  but  after  suffering  awhile 
I  decided  to  speak  to  them  from  an  upper  window.  By 
this  time  they  had  turned  into  a  trio  of  harmless,  neces- 
sary tramps,  and  at  my  appeal  to  them,  absolutely 
nonsensical  as  I  now  believe  it  to  have  been,  to  regard 
the  peculiar  circumstances,  whatever  they  were  or  were 
not,  they  did  really  get  up  from  the  back  porch  where 
they  were  seated  and  go  quietly  away. 

Burglars  are  not  always  so  easily  to  be  entreated. 
On  one  occasion,  when  I  found  a  party  of  them  dig- 
ging at  the  corner  of  my  house  on  Concord  Avenue  in 
Cambridge,  and  opened  the  window  over  them  to  ex- 
postulate, the  leader  looked  up  at  me  in  well-affected 
surprise.  He  lifted  his  hand,  with  a  twenty  -  dollar 
note  in  it,  toward  me,  and  said :  "  Oh !  Can  you  change 
me  a  twenty-dollar  bill  ?"  I  expressed  a  polite  regret 
that  I  had  not  so  much  money  about  me,  and  then  he 

said  to  the  rest,  "  Go  ahead,  boys,"  and  they  went  on 

80 


I    TALK    OF    DKEAMS 

undermining  my  house.  I  do  not  know  what  came  of 
it  all. 

Of  ghosts  I  have  seldom  dreamed,  so  far  as  I  can 
rememher;  in  fact,  I  have  never  dreamed  of  the  kind 
of  ghosts  that  we  are  all  more  or  less  afraid  of,  though 
I  have  dreamed  rather  often  of  the  spirits  of  departed 
friends.  But  I  once  dreamed  of  dying,  and  the  reader, 
who  has  never  died  yet,  may  be  interested  to  know 
what  it  is  like.  According  to  this  experience  of  mine, 
which  I  do  not  claim  is  typical,  it  is  like  a  fire  kindling 
in  an  air-tight  stove  with  •  paper  and  shavings ;  the 
gathering  smoke  and  gases  suddenly  burst  into  flame 
and  puff  the  door  out,  and  all  is  over. 

I  have  not  yet  been  led  to  execution  for  the  many 
crimes  I  have  committed  in  my  dreams,  but  I  was  once 
in  the  hands  of  a  barber  who  added  to  the  shaving  and 
shampooing  business  the  art  of  removing  his  customers' 
heads  in  treatment  for  headache.  As  I  took  my  seat 
in  his  chair  I  had  some  lingering  doubts  as  to  the  effect 
of  a  treatment  so  drastic,  and  I  ventured  to  mention 
the  case  of  a  friend  of  mine,  a  gentleman  somewhat 
eminent  in  the  law,  who  after  several  weeks  was  still 
going  about  without  his  head.  The  barber  did  not  at- 
tempt to  refute  my  position.  He  merely  said :  "  Oh, 
well,  he  had  such  a  very  thick  sort  of  a  head,  anyway." 

This  was  a  sarcasm,  but  I  think  it  was  urged  as  a 
reason,  though  it  may  not  have  been.  We  rarely  bring 
away  from  sleep  the  things  that  seem  so  brilliant  to  us 
in  our  dreams.  Verse  is  especially  apt  to  fade  away, 
or  turn  into  doggerel  in  the  memory,  and  the  witty 
sayings  which  we  contrive  to  remember  will  hardly 
bear  the  test  of  daylight.  The  most  perfect  thing  of 
the  kind  out  of  my  own  dreams  was  something  that  I 
seemed  to  wake  with  the  very  sound  of  in  my  ears. 

It  was  after  a  certain  dinner,  which  had  been  rather 

81 


IMPEESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

uncommonly  gay,  with  a  good  deal  of  very  good  talk, 
which  seemed  to  go  on  all  night,  and  when  I  woke  in 
the  morning  some  one  was  saying :  "  Oh,  I  shouldn't 
at  all  mind  his  robbing  Peter  to  pay  Paul,  if  I  felt 
sure  that  Paul  would  get  the  money."  This  I  think 
really  humorous,  and  an  extremely  neat  bit  of  charac- 
terization; I  feel  free  to  praise  it,  because  it  was  not 
I  who  said  it. 


Apparently  the  greater  part  of  dreams  have  no  more 
mirth  than  sense  in  them.  This  is  perhaps  because  the 
man  is  in  dreams  reduced  to  the  brute  condition,  and  is 
the  lawless  inferior  of  the  waking  man  intellectually, 
as  the  lawless  in  waking  are  always  the  inferiors  of  the 
lawful.  Some  loose  thinkers  suppose  that  if  we  give 
the  rein  to  imagination  it  will  do  great  things,  but  it 
will  really  do  little  things,  foolish  and  worthless  things, 
as  we  witness  in  dreams,  where  it  is  quite  unbridled. 
It  must  keep  close  to  truth,  and  it  must  be  under  the 
law  if  it  would  work  strongly  and  sanely.  The  man 
in  his  dreams  is  really  lower  than  the  lunatic  in  his 
deliriums.  These  have  a  logic  of  their  own;  but  the 
dreamer  has  not  even  a  crazy  logic. 

"  Like  a  dog,  he  hunts  in  dreams," 

and  probably  his  dreams  and  the  dog's  are  not  only 
alike,  but  are  of  the  same  quality.  In  his  wicked 
dreams  the  man  is  not  only  animal,  he  is  devil,  so 
wholly  is  he  let  into  his  evils,  as  the  Swedenborgians 
say.  The  wrong  is  indifferent  to  him  until  the  fear  of 
detection  and  punishment  steals  in  upon  him.  Even 
then  he  is  not  sorry  for  his  misdeed,  as  I  have  said 
before ;  he  is  only  anxious  to  escape  its  consequences. 

82 


I    TALK    OF    DREAMS 

It  seems  probable  that  when  this  fear  makes  itself 
felt  he  is  near  to  waking ;  and  probably  when  we  dream, 
as  we  often  do,  that  the  thing  is  only  a  dream,  and 
hope  for  rescue  from  it  by  waking,  we  are  always  just 
about  to  wake.  This  double  effect  is  very  strange,  but 
still  more  strange  is  the  effect  which  we  are  privy  to 
in  the  minds  of  others  when  they  not  merely  say  things 
to  us  which  are  wholly  unexpected,  but  think  things 
that  we  know  they  are  thinking,  and  that  they  do  not 
express  in  words.  A  great  many  years  ago,  when  I 
was  young,  I  dreamed  that  my  father,  who  was  in  an- 
other town,  came  into  the  room  where  I  was  really 
lying  asleep  and  stood  by  my  bed.  He  wished  to 
greet  me,  after  our  separation,  but  he  reasoned  that  if 
he  did  so  I  should  wake,  and  he  turned  and  left  the 
room  without  touching  me.  This  process  in  his  mind, 
which  I  knew  as  clearly  and  accurately  as  if  it  had 
apparently  gone  on  in  my  own,  was  apparently  con- 
fined to  his  mind  as  absolutely  as  anything  could  be 
that  was  not  spoken  or  in  any  wise  uttered. 

Of  course,  it  was  of  my  agency,  like  any  other  part 
of  the  dream,  and  it  was  something  like  the  operation 
of  the  novelist's  intention  through  the  mind  of  his 
characters.  But  in  this  there  is  the  author's  conscious- 
ness that  he  is  doing  it  all  himself,  while  in  my  dream 
this  reasoning  in  the  mind  of  another  was  something 
that  I  felt  myself  mere  witness  of.  In  fact,  there  is 
no  analogy,  so  far  as  I  can  make  out,  between  the 
process  of  literary  invention  and  the  process  of  dream- 
ing. In  the  invention,  the  critical  faculty  is  vividly 
and  constantly  alert;  in  dreaming,  it  seems  altogether 
absent.  It  seems  absent,  too,  in  what  we  call  day- 
dreaming, or  that  sort  of  dramatizing  action  which 
perhaps  goes  on  perpetually  in  the  mind,  or  some 
minds.  But  this  day-dreaming  is  not  otherwise  any 

7  83 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

more  like  night-dreaming  than  invention  is;  for  the 
man  is  never  more  actively  and  consciously  a  man,  and 
never  has  a  greater  will  to  be  fine  and  high  and  grand 
than  in  his  day-dreams,  while  in  his  night-dreams  he 
is  quite  willing  to  be  a  miscreant  of  any  worst  sort. 

It  is  very  remarkable,  in  view  of  this  fact,  that  we 
have  now  and  then,  though  ever  so  much  more  rarely, 
dreams  that  are  as  angelic  as  those  others  are  demo- 
niac. Is  it  possible  that  then  the  dreamer  is  let  into 
his  goods  (the  word  is  Swedenborg's  again)  instead 
of  his  evils?  It  may  be  supposed  that  in  sleep  the 
dreamer  lies  passive,  while  his  proper  soul  is  away,  and 
other  spirits,  celestial  and  infernal,  have  free  access  to 
his  mind,  and  abuse  it  to  their  own  ends  in  the  one 
case,  and  use  it  in  his  behalf  in  the  other. 

That  would  be  an  explanation,  but  nothing  seems 
quite  to  hold  in  regard  to  dreams.  If  it  is  true,  why 
should  the  dreamer's  state  so  much  oftener  be  imbued 
with  evil  than  with  good?  It  might  be  answered  that 
the  evil  forces  are  much  more  positive  and  aggressive 
than  the  good;  or  that  the  love  of  the  dreamer,  which 
is  his  life,  being  mainly  evil,  invites  the  wicked  spirits 
oftener.  But  that  is  a  point  which  I  would  rather 
leave  each  dreamer  to  settle  for  himself.  The  greater 
number  of  every  one's  dreams,  like  the  romantic  novel, 
I  fancy,  concern  incident  rather  than  character,  and  I 
am  not  sure,  after  all,  that  the  dream  which  convicts 
the  dreamer  of  an  essential  baseness  is  commoner  than 
the  dream  that  tells  in  his  favor  morally. 

I  dare  say  every  reader  of  this  book  has  had  dreams 
so  amusing  that  he  has  wakened  himself  from  them 
by  laughing,  and  then  not  found  them  so  very  funny, 
or  perhaps  not  been  able  to  recall  them  at  all.  I  have 
had  at  least  one  of  this  sort,  remarkable  for  other  rea- 
sons, which  remains  perfect  in  mv  mind,  though  it  is 

84 


I    TALK    OF    DREAMS 

now  some  ten  years  old.  One  of  the  children  had 
been  exposed  to  a  very  remote  chance  of  scarlet-fever 
at  the  house  of  a  friend,  and  had  been  duly  scolded 
for  the  risk,  which  was  then  quite  forgotten.  I  dream- 
ed that  this  friend,  however,  was  giving  a  ladies'  lunch, 
at  which  I  was  unaccountably  and  invisibly  present, 
and  the  talk  began  to  run  upon  the  scarlet-fever  cases 
in  her  family.  She  said  that  after  the  last  she  had 
fumigated  the  whole  house  for  seventy-two  hours  (the 
period  seemed  very  significant  and  important  in  my 
dream),  and  had  burned  everything  she  could  lay  her 
hands  on. 

"  And  what  did  the  nurse  burn  ?"  asked  one  of  the 
other  ladies. 

The  hostess  began  to  laugh.  "  The  nurse  didn't 
burn  a  thing!" 

Then  all  the  rest  burst  out  laughing  at  the  joke,  and 
the  laughter  woke  me,  to  see  the  boy  sitting  up  in  his 
bed  and  hear  him  saying:  "  Oh,  I  am  so  sick!" 

It  was  the  nausea  which  announces  scarlet  -  fever, 
and  for  six  weeks  after  that  we  were  in  quarantine. 
Very  likely  the  fear  of  the  contagion  had  been  in  my 
nether  mind  all  the  time,  but,  so  far  as  consciousness 
could  testify  of  it,  I  had  wholly  forgotten  it. 


VI 


One  rarely  loses  one's  personality  in  dreams;  it  is 
rather  intensified,  with  all  the  proper  circumstances 
and  relations  of  it,  but  I  have  had  at  least  one  dream 
in  which  I  seemed  to  transcend  my  own  circumstance 
and  condition  with  remarkable  completeness.  Even  my 
epoch,  my  precious  present,  I  left  behind  (or  ahead, 

rather) ,  and  in  my  unity  with  the  persons  of  my  dream 

85 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

I  became  strictly  mediaeval.  In  fact,  I  have  always 
called  it  my  mediaeval  dream,  to  such  as  I  could  get 
to  listen  to  it;  and  it  had  for  its  scene  a  feudal  tower 
in  some  waste  place,  a  tower  open  at  the  top  and  with 
a  deep,  clear  pool  of  water  at  the  bottom,  so  that  it 
instantly  became  known  to  me,  as  if  I  had  always 
known  it,  for  the  Pool  Tower.  While  I  stood  looking 
into  it,  in  a  mediaeval  dress  and  a  mediaeval  mood, 
there  came  flying  in  at  the  open  door  of  the  ruin  be- 
side me  the  duke's  hunchback,  and  after  him,  furious 
and  shrieking  maledictions,  the  swarthy  beauty  whom 
I  was  aware  the  duke  was  tired  of.  The  keeping  was 
now  not  only  ducal,  but  thoroughly  Italian,  and  it  was 
suggested  somehow  to  my  own  subtle  Italian  percep- 
tion that  the  hunchback  had  been  set  on  to  tease  the 
girl  and  provoke  her  so  that  she  would  turn  upon  him 
and  try  to  wreak  her  fury  on  him  and  chase  him  into 
the  Pool  Tower  and  up  the  stone  stairs  that  wound 
round  its  hollow  to  the  top,  where  the  solemn  sky 
showed.  The  fearful  spire  of  the  steps  was  unguarded, 
and  when  I  had  lost  the  pair  from  sight,  with  the 
dwarf's  mocking  laughter  and  the  girl's  angry  cries  in 
my  ears,  there  came  fluttering  from  the  height,  like  a 
bird  wounded  and  whirling  from  a  lofty  tree,  the  figure 
of  the  girl,  while  far  aloof  the  hunchback  peered  over 
at  her  fall.  Midway  in  her  descent  her  head  struck 
against  the  edge  of  the  steps,  with  a  Jcish>  such  as  an 
egg  -  shell  makes  when  broken  against  the  edge  of  a 
platter,  and  then  plunged  into  the  dark  pool  at  my 
feet,  where  I  could  presently  see  her  lying  in  the  clear 
depths  and  the  blood  curling  upward  from  the  wound 
in  her  skull  like  a  dark  srnoke.  I  was  not  sensible  of 
any  great  pity ;  I  accepted  the  affair,  quite  mediaevally, 
as  something  that  might  very  well  have  happened,  given 

the  girl,  the  duke  and  the  dwarf,  and  the  time  and  place. 

86 


I    TALK    OF    DREAMS 

I  am  rather  fond  of  a  mediaeval  setting  for  those 
"  Dreams  that  wave  before  the  half -shut  eye," 

just  closing  for  an  afternoon  nap.  Then  I  invite  to 
my  vision  a  wide  landscape,  with  a  cold,  wintry  after- 
noon light  upon  it,  and  over  this  plain  I  have  bands 
and  groups  of  people  scurrying,  in  mediaeval  hose  of 
divers  colors  and  mediaeval  leathern  jerkins,  hugging 
themselves  against  the  frost,  and  very  miserable.  They 
affect  me  with  a  profound  compassion;  they  represent 
to  me,  somehow,  the  vast  mass  of  humanity,  the  mass 
that  does  the  work,  and  earns  the  bread,  and  goes  cold 
and  hungry  through  all  the  ages.  I  should  be  at  a 
loss  to  say  why  this  was  the  effect,  and  I  am  utterly 
unable  to  say  why  these  fore-dreams,  which  I  partially 
solicit,  should  have  such  a  tremendous  significance  as 
they  seem  to  have.  They  are  mostly  of  the  most 
evanescent  and  intangible  character,  but  they  have  one 
trait  in  common.  They  always  involve  the  attribution 
of  ethical  motive  and  quality  to  material  things,  and 
in  their  passage  through  my  brain  they  promise  me  a 
solution  of  the  riddle  of  the  painful  earth  in  the  very 
instant  when  they  are  gone  forever.  They  are  of  in- 
numerable multitude,  chasing  each  other  with  the  swift- 
ness of  light,  and  never  staying  to  be  seized  by  the 
memory,  which  seems  already  drugged  with  sleep  be- 
fore their  course  begins.  One  of  these  dreams,  indeed, 
I  did  capture,  and  I  found  it  to  be  the  figure  8,  but 
lying  on  its  side,  and  in  that  posture  involving  the  mys- 
tery and  the  revelation  of  the  mystery  of  the  universe. 
I  leave  the  reader  to  imagine  why. 

As  we  grow  older,  I  think  we  are  less  and  less  able 
to  remember  our  dreams.  This  is  perhaps  because  the 
experience  of  youth  is  less  dense,  and  the  empty  spaces 
of  the  young  consciousness  are  more  hospitable  to  these 

87 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

airy  visitants.  A  few  dreams  of  my  later  life  stand 
out  in  strong  relief,  but  for  the  most  part  they  blend 
in  an  indistinguishable  mass,  and  pass  away  with  the 
actualities  into  a  common  oblivion.  I  should  say  that 
they  were  more  frequent  with  me  than  they  used  to  be ; 
it  seems  to  me  that  now  I  dream  whole  nights  through, 
and  much  more  about  the  business  of  my  waking  life 
than  formerly.  As  I  earn  my  living  by  weaving  a 
certain  sort  of  dreams  into  literary  form,  it  might  be 
supposed  that  I  would  sometime  dream  of  the  person- 
ages in  these  dreams,  but  I  cannot  remember  that  I 
have  ever  done  so.  The  two  kinds  of  inventing,  the 
voluntary  and  the  involuntary,  seem  absolutely  and 
finally  distinct. 

Of  the  prophetic  dreams  which  people  sometimes 
have  I  have  mentioned  the  only  one  of  mine  which 
had  any  dramatic  interest,  but  I  have  verified  in  my 
own  experience  the  theory  of  Ribot  that  approaching 
disease  sometimes  intimates  itself  in  dreams  of  the 
disorder  impending,  before  it  is  otherwise  declared  in 
the  organism.  In  actual  sickness  I  think  that  I  dream 
rather  less  than  in  health.  I  had  a  malarial  fever  when 
I  was  a  boy,  and  I  had  a  sort  of  continuous  dream,  in 
it  that  distressed  me  greatly.  It  was  of  gliding  down 
the  school-house  stairs  without  touching  my  feet  to  the 
steps,  and  this  was  indescribably  appalling. 

The  anguish  of  mind  that  one  suffers  from  the  im- 
aginary dangers  of  dreams  is  probably  of  the  same 
quality  as  that  inspired  by  real  peril  in  waking.  A 
curious  proof  of  this  happened  within  my  knowledge 
not  many  years  ago.  One  of  the  neighbor's  children 
was  coasting  down  a  long  hill  with  a  railroad  at  the 
foot  of  it,  and  as  he  neared  the  bottom  an  express-train 
rushed  round  the  curve.  The  flag-man  ran  forward 

and  shouted  to  the  boy  to  throw  himself  off  his  sled, 

88 


I    TALK    OF    DREAMS 

but  he  kept  on  and  ran  into  the  locomotive,  and  was 
so  hurt  that  he  died.  His  injuries,  however,  were  to 
the  spine,  and  they  were  of  a  kind  that  rendered  him 
insensible  to  pain  while  he  lived.  He  talked  very 
clearly  and  calmly  of  his  accident,  and  when  he  was 
asked  why  he  did  not  throw  himself  off  his  sled,  as 
the  flag-man  bade  him,  he  said:  "I  thought  it  was  a 
dream."  The  reality  had,  through  the  mental  stress, 
no  doubt  transmuted  itself  to  the  very  substance  of 
dreams,  and  he  had  felt  the  same  kind  and  quality  of 
suffering  as  he  would  have  done  if  he  had  been  dream- 
ing. The  Norwegian  poet  and  novelist  Bjornstjerne 
Bjornson  was  at  my  house  shortly  after  this  hap- 
pened, and  he  was  greatly  struck  by  the  psychological 
implications  of  the  incident ;  it  seemed  to  mean  for  him 
all  sorts  of  possibilities  in  the  obscure  realm  where  it 
cast  a  fitful  light. 

But  such  a  glimmer  soon  fades,  and  the  darkness 
thickens  round  us  again.  It  is  not  with  the  blindfold 
sense  of  sleep  that  we  shall  ever  find  out  the  secret  of 
life,  I  fancy,  either  in  the  dreams  which  seem  personal 
to  us  each  one,  or  those  universal  dreams  which  we 
apparently  share  with  the  whole  race.  Of  the  race- 
dream,  as  I  may  call  it,  there  is  one  hardly  less  com- 
mon than  that  dream  of  going  about  insufficiently  clad, 
which  I  have  already  mentioned,  and  that  is  the  dream 
of  suddenly  falling  from  some  height  and  waking  with 
a  start.  The  experience  before  the  start  is  extremely 
dim,  and  latterly  I  have  condensed  this  dread  almost 
as  much  as  the  preliminary  passages  of  my  burglar- 
dream.  I  am  aware  of  nothing  but  an  instant  of 
danger,  and  then  comes  the  jar  or  jolt  that  wakens 
me.  Upon  the  whole,  I  find  this  a  great  saving  of 
emotion,  and  I  do  not  know  but  there  is  a  tendency, 

as  I  grow  older,  to  shorten  up  the  detail  of  what  may 

89 


IMPEESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

be  styled  the  conventional  dream,  the  dream  which  we 
have  so  often  that  it  is  like  a  story  read  before.  In- 
deed, the  plots  of  dreams  are  not  much  more  varied 
than  the  plots  of  romantic  novels,  which  are  notorious- 
ly stale  and  hackneyed.  It  would  be  interesting,  and 
possibly  important,  if  some  observer  would  note  the  re- 
currence of  this  sort  of  dreams  and  classify  their  va- 
rieties. I  think  we  should  all  be  astonished  to  find 
how  few  and  slight  the  variations  were. 


VII 


If  I  come  to  speak  of  dreams  concerning  the  dead, 
it  must  be  with  a  tenderness  and  awe  that  all  who  have 
had  them  will  share  with  me.  Nothing  is  more  remark- 
able in  them  than  the  fact  that  the  dead,  though  they 
are  dead,  yet  live,  and  are,  to  our  commerce  with  them, 
quite  like  all  other  living  persons.  We  may  recognize, 
and  they  may  recognize,  that  they  are  no  longer  in  the 
body,  but  they  are  as  verily  living  as  we  are.  This 
may  be  merely  an  effect  from  the  doctrine  of  im- 
mortality which  we  all  hold  or  have  held,  and  yet  I 
would  fain  believe  that  it  may  be  something  like  proof 
of  it.  No  one  really  knows,  or  can  know,  but  one  may 
at  least  hope,  without  offending  science,  which  indeed 
no  longer  frowns  so  darkly  upon  faith.  This  per- 
sistence of  life  in  those  whom  we  mourn  as  dead,  may 
not  it  be  a  witness  of  the  fact  that  the  consciousness 
cannot  accept  the  notion  of  death  at  all,  and, 

"Whatever  crazy  sorrow  saith," 

that  we  have  never  truly  felt  them  lost?     Sometimes 
those  who  have  died  come  back  in  dreams  as  parts  of 

a  common  life  which  seems  never  to  have  been  broken ; 

90 


I    TALK    OF    DEEAMS 

the  old  circle  is  restored  without  a  flaw;  but  whether 
they  do  this,  or  whether  it  is  acknowledged  between 
them  and  us  that  they  have  died,  and  are  now  disem- 
bodied spirits,  the  effect  of  life  is  the  same.  Perhaps 
in  those  dreams  they  and  we  are  alike  disembodied 
spirits,  and  the  soul  of  the  dreamer,  which  so  often 
seems  to  abandon  the  body  to  the  animal,  is  then  the 
conscious  entity,  the  thing  which  the  dreamer  feels  to 
be  himself,  and  is  mingling  with  the  souls  of  the  de- 
parted on  something  like  the  terms  which  shall  here- 
after be  constant. 

I  think  very  few  of  those  who  have  lost  their  be- 
loved have  failed  to  receive  some  sign  or  message  from 
them  in  dreams,  and  often  it  is  of  deep  and  abiding 
consolation.  It  may  be  that  this  is  our  anguish  com- 
pelling the  echo  of  love  out  of  the  darkness  where 
nothing  is,  but  it  may  be  that  there  is  something  there 
which  answers  to  our  throe  with  pity  and  with  longing 
like  our  own.  Again,  no  one  knows,  but  in  a  matter 
impossible  of  definite  solution  I  will  not  refuse  the 
comfort  which  belief  can  give.  Unbelief  can  be  no 
gain,  and  belief  no  loss.  But  those  dreams  are  so 
dear,  so  sacred,  so  interwoven  with  the  finest  and  ten- 
derest  tissues  of  our  being  that  one  cannot  speak  of 
them  freely,  or  indeed  more  than  most  vaguely.  It  is 
enough  to  say  that  one  has  had  them,  and  to  know 
that  almost  every  one  else  has  had  them,  too.  They 
seem  to  be  among  the  universal  dreams,  and  a  strange 
quality  of  them  is  that,  though  they  deal  with  a  fact 
of  universal  doubt,  they  are,  to  my  experience  at  least, 
not  nearly  so  fantastic  or  capricious  as  the  dreams  that 
deal  with  the  facts  of  every-day  life  and  with  the  af- 
fairs of  people  still  in  this  world. 

I  do  not  know  whether  it  is  common  to  dream  of 
faces  or  figures  strange  to  our  waking  knowledge,  but 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

occasionally  I  have  done  this.  I  suppose  it  is  much 
the  same  kind  of  invention  that  causes  the  person  we 
dream  of  to  say  or  do  a  thing  unexpected  to  us.  But 
this  is  rather  common,  and  the  creation  of  a  novel  as- 
pect, the  physiognomy  of  a  stranger,  in  the  person  we 
dream  of,  is  rather  rare.  In  all  my  dreams  I  can  recall 
but  one  presence  of  the  kind.  I  have  never  dreamed 
of  any  sort  of  monster  foreign  to  my  knowledge,  or 
even  of  any  grotesque  thing  made  up  of  elements  fa- 
miliar to  it;  the  grotesqueness  has  always  been  in  the 
motive  or  circumstance  of  the  dream.  I  have  very 
seldom  dreamed  of  animals,  though  once,  when  I  was 
a  boy,  for  a  time  after  I  had  passed  a  corn-field  where 
there  were  some  bundles  of  snakes,  writhen  and  knot- 
ted together  in  the  cold  of  an  early  spring  day,  I  had 
dreams  infested  by  like  images  of  those  loathsome 
reptiles.  I  suppose  that  every  one  has  had  dreams  of 
finding  his  way  through  unnamable  filth  and  of  feed- 
ing upon  hideous  carnage;  these  are  clearly  the  pun- 
ishment of  gluttony,  and  are  the  fumes  of  a  rebellious 
stomach. 

I  have  heard  people  say  they  have  sometimes  dream- 
ed of  a  thing,  and  awakened  from  their  dream  and 
then  fallen  asleep  and  dreamed  of  the  same  thing; 
but  I  believe  that  this  is  all  one  continuous  dream; 
that  they  did  not  really  awaken,  but  only  dreamed  that 
they  awakened.  I  have  never  had  any  such  dream,  but 
at  one  time  I  had  a  recurrent  dream,  which  was  so 
singular  that  I  thought  no  one  else  had  ever  had  a  re- 
current dream  till  I  proved  that  it  was  rather  common 
by  starting  the  inquiry  in  the  Contributors'  Club  in 
the  Atlantic  Monthly,  when  I  found  that  great  numbers 
of  people  have  recurrent  dreams.  My  own  recurrent 
dreams  began  to  come  during  the  first  year  of  my  con- 
sulate at  Venice,  where  I  had  hoped  to  find  the  same 

92 


I    TALK    OF    DREAMS 

kind  of  poetic  dimness  on  the  phases  of  American 
life,  which  I  wished  to  treat  in  literature,  as  the  dis- 
tance in  time  would  have  given.  I  should  not  wish 
any  such  dimness  now;  but  those  were  my  romantic 
days,  and  I  was  sorely  baffled  by  its  absence.  The 
disappointment  began  to  haunt  my  nights  as  well  as 
my  days,  and  a  dream  repeated  itself  from  week  to 
week  for  a  matter  of  eight  or  ten  months  to  one  effect. 
I  dreamed  that  I  had  gone  home  to  America,  and  that 
people  met  me  and  said,  "  Why,  you  have  given  up 
your  place!"  and  I  always 'answered:  "Certainly  not; 
I  haven't  done  at  all  what  I  mean  to  do  there,  yet.  I 
am  only  here  on  my  ten  days'  leave."  I  meant  the 
ten  days  which  a  consul  might  take  each  quarter  with- 
out applying  to  the  Department  of  State;  and  then  I 
would  reflect  how  impossible  it  was  that  I  should  make 
the  visit  in  that  time.  I  saw  that  I  should  be  found 
out  and  dismissed  from  my  office  and  publicly  dis- 
graced. Then,  suddenly,  I  was  not  consul  at  Venice, 
and  had  not  been,  but  consul  at  Delhi,  in  India;  and 
the  distress  I  felt  would  all  end  in  a  splendid  Oriental 
phantasmagory  of  elephants  and  native  princes,  with 
their  retinues  in  procession,  which  I  suppose  was  most- 
ly out  of  my  reading  of  De  Quincey.  This  dream, 
with  no  variation  that  I  can  recall,  persisted  till  I  broke 
it  up  by  saying,  in  the  morning  after  it  had  recurred, 
that  I  had  dreamed  that  dream  again;  and  so  it  began 
to  fade  away,  coming  less  and  less  frequently,  and  at 
last  ceasing  altogether. 

I  am  rather  proud  of  that  dream;  it  is  really  my 
battle-horse  among  dreams,  and  I  think  I  will  ride 
away  on  it. 


AN   EAST-SIDE   EAMBLE 

THE  New- Yorkers,  following  the  custom  of  Europe, 
often  fence  themselves  about  with  a  great  deal  of 
ceremony  in  social  matters,  even  such  small  social 
matters  as  making  calls. 

Some  ladies  have  days  when  they  receive  calls ;  others 
have  no  specified  day,  and  then  you  take  your  chance 
of  heing  turned  from  the  door  without  seeing  them, 
or  if  you  find  them,  of  finding  them  reluctant  and 
preoccupied.  A  friend  of  mine  says  he  has  often  felt 
as  if  he  had  been  admitted  through  the  error  of  the 
man  or  the  maid  who  opened  the  door  to  him  at  such 
houses,  and  who  returned,  after  carrying  up  his  name, 
to  say,  with  a  frightened  air,  that  the  lady  would  be 
down  in  a  moment. 

But  when  there  are  days  there  is  never  any  misgiv- 
ing about  letting  you  in.  The  door  is  whisked  open 
before  you  have  had  time  to  ring,  sometimes  by  a  ser- 
vant who  has  the  effect  of  not  belonging  to  the  house, 
but  hired  for  the  afternoon.  Then  you  leave  your  card 
on  a  platter  of  some  sort  in  the  hall  to  attest  the  fact 
of  your  visit,  and  at  the  simpler  houses  find  your  way 
into  the  drawing-room  unannounced,  though  the  English 
custom  of  shouting  your  name  before  you  is  very  com- 
mon and  is  always  observed  where  there  is  any  pretence 
to  fashion.  Certain  ladies  receive  once  a  week  through- 
out the  season;  others  receive  on  some  day  each  week 
of  December  or  January  or  February,  as  the  case  may 

94 


AN    EAST-SIDE    KAMBLE 

be.  When  there  is  this  limit  to  a  month  the  reception 
insensibly  takes  on  the  character  of  an  afternoon  tea, 
and,  in  fact,  it  varies  from  that  only  in  being  a  little 
less  crowded.  There  is  tea  or  chocolate  or  mild  punch, 
and  a  table  spread  with  pastries  and  sweets,  which 
hardly  any  one  touches.  A  young  lady  dedicates  her- 
self to  the  service  of  each  urn  and  offers  you  the 
beverage  that  flows  from  it.  There  is  a  great  air  of 
gayety,  a  very  excited  chatter  of  female  voices,  a  con- 
stant flutter  of  greeting  and  leave-taking,  and  a  gen- 
eral sense  of  amiable  emptiness  and  bewildered  kind- 
ness when  you  come  away.  The  genius  of  these  little 
affairs  is  supposed  to  be  informality,  but  at  some  houses 
where  you  enjoy  such  informalities  you  find  two  men 
in  livery  on  the  steps  outside,  a  third  opens  the  door 
for  you,  a  fourth  takes  your  hat  and  stick,  a  fifth  re- 
ceives your  overcoat,  and  a  sixth  catches  at  your  name 
and  miscalls  it  into  the  drawing-room. 


But  I  must  not  give  too  exclusive  an  impression  of 
ceremony  in  the  New-Yorkers.  I  made  some  calls 
about  Christmas  -  time  last  year  in  a  quarter  of  the 
city  where  the  informalities  are  real  and  where  the 
hospitalities,  such  as  they  were,  I  thought  as  sincere 
as  in  the  houses  where  the  informalities  are  more  ap- 
parent. The  sort  of  calls  I  made  were  rather  fashion- 
able some  years  ago,  but  are  so  no  longer.  It  was  a 
fad  to  make  them,  and  the  fad,  like  all  really  nice  fads, 
came  from  England,  and  perhaps  it  has  now  died  out 
here  because  it  has  died  out  there.  At  any  rate,  it 
seems  certain  that  there  is  now  less  interest,  less  curi- 
osity, concerning  the  home  life  of  the  poor  than  there 

95 


IMPKESSIONS    AND    EXPEKIENCES 

was  then  among  the  comfortable  people.  I  do  not  say 
there  is  less  sympathy — there  must  be  still  a  good  deal 
of  sympathy — but  I  should  say  there  was  less  hope 
with  the  well-to-do  of  bettering  the  condition  of  the 
ill-to-do;  some  philosophers  even  warn  us  against  in- 
dulging a  feeling  of  commiseration,  lest  it  should  en- 
courage the  poor  to  attempt  themselves  to  better  their 
condition. 

Yet  there  are  no  signs  of  rebellion  on  the  part  of 
the  poor,  whom  I  found  as  tame  and  peaceful,  appar- 
ently, when  I  went  the  rounds  of  their  unceremonious 
at-homes  as  the  most  anxious  philosopher  could  desire. 
My  calls  were  by  no  means  of  the  nature  of  a  perqui- 
sition, but  they  left  very  little  unknown  to  me,  I  fancy, 
of  the  way  the  poor  live,  so  frank  and  simple  is  their 
life.  They  included  some  tenements  of  the  American 
quarter,  near  the  point  of  the  island,  on  the  West  Side, 
and  a  rather  greater  number  on  the  East  Side,  in  the 
heart  of  the  district  abandoned  chiefly  to  the  Russian 
Jews,  though  there  are  no  doubt  other  nationalities  to 
be  found  there.  It  is  said  to  be  more  densely  popu- 
lated than  any  other  area  in  the  world,  or  at  least  in 
Christendom,  for  within  a  square  mile  there  are  more 
than  three  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  men,  women, 
and  children.  One  can  imagine  from  this  fact  alone 
how  they  are  housed  and  what  their  chances  of  the 
comforts  and  decencies  of  life  may  be.  But  I  must 
not  hurry  to  the  region  of  these  homes  before  I  have 
first  tried  to  show  the  interiors  of  that  quarter  called 
American,  where  I  found  the  Americans  represented, 
as  they  are  so  often,  by  Irish  people.  The  friend  who 
went  with  me  on  my  calls  led  me  across  the  usual 
surface  tracks,  under  the  usual  elevated  tracks,  and 
suddenly  dodged  before  me  into  an  alleyway  about 
two  feet  wide.  This  crept  under  houses  fronting  on 


AN    EAST-SIDE    RAMBLE 

the  squalid  street  we  had  left  and  gave  into  a  sort  of 
court  some  ten  or  twelve  feet  wide  by  thirty  or  forty 
feet  long.  The  buildings  surrounding  it  were  low  and 
very  old.  One  of  them  was  a  stable,  which  contributed 
its  stench  to  the  odors  that  rose  from  the  reeking  pave- 
ment and  from  the  closets  filling  an  end  of  the  court, 
with  a  corner  left  beside  them  for  the  hydrant  that 
supplied  the  water  of  the  whole  enclosure.  It  is  from 
this  court  that  the  inmates  of  the  tenements  have  their 
sole  chance  of  sun  and  air.  What  the  place  must  be 
in  summer  I  had  not  the  heart  to  think,  and  on  the 
wintry  day  of  my  visit  I  could  not  feel  the  fury  of  the 
skies  which  my  guide  said  would  have  been  evident  to 
me  if  I  had  seen  it  in  August.  I  could  better  fancy 
this  when  I  climbed  the  rickety  stairs  within  one  of 
the  houses  and  found  myself  in  a  typical  New  York 
tenement.  Then  I  almost  choked  at  the  thought  of 
what  a  hot  day,  what  a  hot  night,  must  be  in  such  a 
place,  with  the  two  small  windows  inhaling  the  putrid 
breath  of  the  court  and  transmitting  it,  twice  fouled 
by  the  passage  through  the  living-room,  to  the  black 
hole  in  the  rear,  where  the  whole  family  lay  on  the 
heap  of  rags  that  passed  for  a  bed. 

We  had  our  choice  which  door  to  knock  at  on  the 
narrow  landing,  a  yard  wide  at  most,  which  opened 
into  such  tenements  to  the  right  and  left  as  many 
stories  up  as  the  stairs  mounted.  We  stood  at  once 
in  the  presence  of  the  hostess;  there  was  no  ceremony 
of  sending  in  our  cards  here  or  having  our  names 
called  to  her.  In  one  case  we  found  her  over  the 
washtub,  with  her  three  weeks'  babe  bundled  in  a  chair 
beside  it.  A  table,  with  a  half-eaten  loaf  that  formed 
her  breakfast,  on  it,  helped,  with  the  cooking-stove,  to 
crowd  the  place  past  any  possibility  of  sitting  down, 

if  there  had  been  chairs  to  sit  in;  so  we  stood,  as 

97 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

people  do  at  an  afternoon  tea.  At  sight  of  us  the 
woman  began  to  cry  and  complain  that  her  man  had 
been  drunk  and  idle  for  a  month  and  did  nothing  for 
her;  though  in  these  times  he  might  have  been  sober 
and  idle  and  done  as  little.  Some  good  soul  was  pay- 
ing the  rent  for  her,  which  was  half  as  great  as  would 
have  hired  a  decent  flat  in  a  good  part  of  the  town; 
but  how  her  food  came  or  the  coal  for  her  stove  re- 
mained a  mystery  which  we  did  not  try  to  solve.  She 
wiped  her  tears  at  the  exhibition  of  a  small  coin,  which 
she  had  perhaps  dimly  foreseen  through  them  from 
the  moment  they  began  to  flow.  It  was  wrong,  per- 
haps, to  give  her  money,  but  it  was  not  very  wrong, 
perhaps,  for  the  money  was  not  very  much,  and  if  it 
pauperized  her  it  could  not  have  been  said  that  she 
was  wholly  unpauperized  before  she  took  it.  These 
are  very  difficult  cases,  but  all  life  is  a  hopeless  tangle, 
and  the  right  is  something  that  does  not  show  itself 
at  once,  especially  in  economical  affairs. 

In  another  tenement  we  found  a  family  as  gay  and 
hopeful  as  this  was  dismal  and  desperate.  An  Irish 
lady,  with  a  stylish  fringe  of  red  hair  decorating  her 
forehead,  welcomed  us  with  excuses  for  the  state  of  the 
apartment,  which  in  the  next  breath  she  proved  herself 
very  proud  of,  for  she  said  that  if  people  were  not 
comfortable  in  their  houses  it  was  because  they  were 
slovenly  and  untidy.  I  could  not  see  that  she  was 
neater  than  her  neighbor  on  the  landing  below.  She 
had  a  florid  taste  in  pictures,  and  half  a  dozen  large 
colored  prints  went  far  to  hide  the  walls,  which,  she 
said,  the  landlord  had  lately  had  whitewashed,  though 
to  eyes  less  fond  than  hers  they  showed  a  livid  blue. 
The  whitewashing  was  the  sole  repairs  which  had  been 
put  upon  her  tenement  since  she  came  into  it,  but  she 

seemed  to  think  it  quite  enough;  and  her  man,  who 

98 


AN    EAST-SIDE    RAMBLE 

sat  at  leisure  near  the  stove,  in  the  three  days'  beard 
which  seems  inseparable  from  idle  poverty,  was  quite 
boastful  of  its  advantages.  He  said  that  he  had  lived 
in  that  court  for  thirty  years  and  there  was  no  such 
air  anywhere  else  in  this  world.  I  could  readily  be- 
lieve him,  being  there  to  smell  it  and  coming  away 
with  the  taste  of  it  in  my  mouth.  Like  other  neces- 
saries of  life,  it  must  have  been  rather  scanty  in  that 
happy  home,  especially  at  night,  when  the  dark  fell 
outside  and  a  double  dark  thickened  in  the  small  bin 
which  stood  open  to  our  gaze  at  the  end  of  the  room. 
The  whitewash  seemed  not  to  have  penetrated  to  this 
lair,  where  a  frowzy  mattress  showed  itself  on  a  rickety 
bedstead.  The  beds  in  these  sleeping-holes  were  never 
made  up;  they  were  rounded  into  a  heap  and  seemed 
commonly  of  a  coarse  brown  sacking.  They  had  al- 
ways a  horrible  fascination  for  me.  I  fancied  them 
astir  with  a  certain  life  which,  if  there  had  been  a  con- 
sensus of  it  to  that  effect,  might  have  walked  off  with 
them. 

All  the  tenements  here  were  of  this  size  and  shape 
—a  room  with  windows  opening  upon  the  court,  and  at 
the  rear  the  small  black  bin  or  pen  for  the  bed.  The 
room  was  perhaps  twelve  feet  square  and  the  bin  was 
six,  and  for  such  a  dwelling  the  tenant  pays  six  dollars 
a  month.  If  he  fails  to  pay  it  he  is  evicted,  and  some 
thirty  thousand  evictions  have  taken  place  in  the  past 
year.  But  an  eviction  is  by  no  means  the  dreadful 
hardship  the  reader  would  perhaps  imagine  it.  To  be 
sure,  it  means  putting  the  tenant  on  the  sidewalk  with 
his  poor  household  gear  in  any  weather  and  at  any 
hour;  but,  if  it  is  very  cold  or  very  wet  weather,  the 
evicted  family  is  seldom  suffered  to  pass  the  night 
there.  The  wretched  neighbors  gather  about  and  take 
them  in,  and  their  life  begins  again  on  the  old  terms; 

8  "99 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

or  the  charities  come  to  their  aid,  and  they  are  dis- 
persed into  the  different  refuges  until  the  father  or 
mother  can  find  another  hole  for  them  to  crawl  into. 
Still,  natural  as  it  all  is,  I  should  think  it  must  sur- 
prise an  Irishman,  who  supposed  he  had  left  eviction 
behind  him  in  his  native  land,  to  find  it  so  rife  in  the 
country  of  his  adoption. 


II 


My  friend  asked  me  if  I  would  like  to  go  into  any 
other  tenements,  but  I  thought  that  if  what  I  had  seen 
was  typical  I  had  seen  enough  in  that  quarter.  The 
truth  is,  I  had  not  yet  accustomed  myself  to  going  in 
upon  people  in  that  way,  though  they  seemed  accus- 
tomed to  being  gone  in  upon  without  any  ceremony 
but  the  robust  "  Good-morning !"  my  companion  gave 
them  by  way  of  accounting  for  our  presence,  and  I 
wanted  a  little  interval  to  prepare  myself  for  further 
forays.  The  people  seemed  quite  ready  to  be  ques- 
tioned, and  answered  us  as  persons  in  authority.  They 
may  have  taken  us  for  detectives,  or  agents  of  benev- 
olent societies,  or  journalists  in  search  of  copy.  In 
any  case,  they  had  nothing  to  lose  and  they  might 
have  something  to  gain;  so  they  received  us  kindly 
and  made  us  as  much  at  home  among  them  as  they 
knew  how.  It  may  have  been  that  in  some  instances 
they  supposed  that  we  were  members  of  the  Board  of 
Health  and  were  their  natural  allies  against  their  land- 
lords. 

I  had  not  realized  before  how  much  this  noble  in- 
stitution can  befriend  the  poor,  so  potently  sustained 
as  it  is  in  the  discharge  of  its  duties  by  the  popular 

sentiment  in  a  land  where  popular  sentiment  is  so  of- 

100 


AN    EAST-SIDE    RAMBLE 

ten  so  weak.  It  has  full  power,  in  the  public  interest, 
to  order  repairs  and  betterments  necessary  for  the  gen- 
eral health  in  any  domicile,  rich  or  poor,  in  the  city, 
and  no  man's  pleasure  or  profit  may  hinder  it.  In 
cases  of  contagion  or  infection,  it  may  isolate  the  neigh- 
borhood or  vacate  the  premises,  or,  in  certain  desperate 
conditions,  destroy  them.  As  there  are  always  pesti- 
lences of  some  sort  preying  upon  the  poor  (as  if  their 
poverty  were  not  enough),  my  companion  could  point 
out  a  typhus  quarter,  which  the  Board  had  shut  up 
and  which  we  must  not  approach.  Such  minor  plagues 
as  small-pox,  scarlet-fever,  and  diphtheria  are  quickly 
discovered  and  made  known,  and  the  places  that  they 
have  infested  are  closed  till  they  can  be  thoroughly 
purified.  Any  tenant  believing  his  premises  to  be  in 
an  unwholesome  or  dangerous  state  may  call  in  the 
Board,  and  from  its  decision  the  landlord  has  no  ap- 
peal. He  must  make  the  changes  the  Board  ordains, 
and  he  must  make  them  at  his  own  cost,  though  no 
doubt,  when  the  tenant  can  pay,  he  contrives  somehow 
to  make  him  pay  in  the  end.  The  landlord,  especially 
if  he  battens  on  the  poorer  sort  of  tenants,  is  always 
in  fear  of  the  Board,  and  the  tenant  is  in  love  with  it, 
for  he  knows  that,  in  a  community  otherwise  delivered 
over  to  the  pursuit  of  pelf  or  pleasure,  it  stands  his 
ready  friend,  whose  mandate  private  interest  obeys  as 
it  obeys  no  other.  It  seems  to  have  more  honor  than 
any  other  institution  among  us,  and,  amid  the  most 
frightful  corruption  of  every  kind,  to  remain  incor- 
ruptible. Very  likely  the  landlord  may  sometimes 
think  that  it  abuses  its  power,  but  the  tenant  never 
thinks  so,  and  the  public  seems  always  to  agree  with 
the  tenant.  The  press,  which  is  so  keen  to  scent  out 
paternalism  in  municipal  or  national  affairs,  has  not 

vet  perceived  any  odor  of  it  in  the  Board  of  Health, 

101 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

and  stands  its  constant  friend,  though  it  embodies  in 
the  most  distinctive  form  the  principle  that,  in  a 
civilized  community,  the  collective  interest  is  supreme. 
Even  if  such  an  extension  of  its  powers  were  not  in 
the  order  of  evolution,  it  would  not  be  so  illogical  for 
the  Board  of  Health  to  command  the  abatement  of 
poverty  when  the  diseases  that  flow  from  poverty  can- 
not be  otherwise  abated.  I  should  not  like  to  prophesy 
that  it  will  ever  do  so,  but  stranger  things  have  hap- 
pened through  the  necessity  that  knows  no  law,  not 
even  the  law  of  demand  and  supply — the  demand  of 
Moloch  and  the  supply  of  Misery. 


Ill 


I  do  not  know  whether  the  Hebrew  quarter,  when 
I  began  to  make  my  calls  there,  seemed  any  worse 
than  the  American  quarter  or  not.  But  I  noticed 
presently  a  curious  subjective  effect  in  myself,  which 
I  offer  for  the  reader's  speculation. 

There  is  something  in  a  very  little  experience  of 
such  places  that  blunts  the  perception,  so  that  they  do 
not  seem  so  dreadful  as  they  are;  and  I  should  feel  as 
if  I  were  exaggerating  if  I  recorded  my  first  impres- 
sion of  their  loathsomeness.  I  soon  came  to  look  upon 
the  conditions  as  normal,  not  for  me,  indeed,  or  for 
the  kind  of  people  I  mostly  consort  with,  but  for  the 
inmates  of  the  dens  and  lairs  about  me.  Perhaps  this 
was  partly  their  fault;  they  were  uncomplaining,  if 
not  patient,  in  circumstances  where  I  believe  a  single 
week's  sojourn,  with  no  more  hope  of  a  better  lot  than 
they  could  have,  would  make  anarchists  of  the  best 
people  in  the  city.  Perhaps  the  poor  people  them- 
selves are  not  so  thoroughly  persuaded  that  there  is 

102 


AN    EAST-SIDE    RAMBLE 

anything  very  unjust  in  their  fate,  as  the  compassion- 
ate think.  They  at  least  do  not  know  the  better  fortune 
of  others,  and  they  have  the  habit  of  passively  en- 
during their  own.  I  found  them  usually  cheerful  in 
the  Hebrew  quarter,  and  they  had  so  much  courage 
as  enabled  them  to  keep  themselves  noticeably  clean 
in  an  environment  where  I  am  afraid  their  betters 
Would  scarcely  have  had  heart  to  Wash  their  faces  and 
comb  their  hair.  There  was  even  a  decent  tidiness  in 
their  dress,  which  I  did  not  find  Very  ragged,  though 
it  often  seemed  unseasonable  and  insufficient.  But 
here  again,  as  in  many  other  phases  of  life,  I  was 
struck  by  men's  heroic  superiority  to  their  fate,  if 
their  fate  is  hard;  and  I  felt  anew  that  if  prosperous 
and  comfortable  people  were  as  good  in  proportion  to 
their  fortune  as  these  people  were  they  would  be  as 
the  angels  of  light,  which  I  am  afraid  they  now  but 
faintly  resemble. 

One  of  the  places  we  visited  was  a  court  somewhat 
like  that  we  had  already  seen  in  the  American  quarter, 
but  rather  smaller  and  with  more  the  effect  of  a  pit, 
since  the  walls  around  it  were  so  much  higher.  There 
was  the  same  row  of  closets  at  one  side  and  the  hy- 
drant next  them,  but  here  the  hydrant  was  bound  up 
in  rags  to  keep  it  from  freezing,  apparently,  and  the 
wretched  place  was  by  no  means  so  foul  under  foot. 
To  be  sure,  there  was  no  stable  to  contribute  its  filth, 
but  we  learned  that  a  suitable  stench  was  not  wanting 
from  a  bakery  in  one  of  the  basements,  which  a  man 
in  good  clothes  and  a  large  watch-chain  told  us  rose 
from  it  in  suffocating  fumes  at  a  certain  hour,  when 
the  baker  was  doing  some  unimaginable  thing  to  the 
bread.  This  man  seemed  to  be  the  employer  of  labor 
in  one  of  the  rooms  above,  and  he  said  that  when  the 
smell  began  they  could  hardly  breathe.  He  caught 

103 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

promptly  at  the  notion  of  the  Board  of  Health,  and  I 
dare  say  that  the  baker  will  be  duly  abated.  None  of 
the  other  people  complained,  but  that  was  perhaps 
because  they  had  only  their  Yiddish  to  complain  in, 
and  knew  that  it  would  be  wasted  on  us.  They  seemed 
neither  curious  nor  suspicious  concerning  us;  they  let 
us  go  everywhere,  as  if  they  had  no  thought  of  hinder- 
ing us.  One  of  the  tenements  we  entered  had  just  been 
vacated;  but  there  was  a  little  girl  of  ten  there,  with 
some  much  smaller  children,  amusing  them  in  the 
empty  space.  Through  a  public-spirited  boy,  who  had 
taken  charge  of  us  from  the  beginning  and  had  a  just- 
ly humorous  sense  of  the  situation,  we  learned  that 
this  little  maid  was  not  the  sister  but  the  servant  of 
the  others,  for  even  in  these  low  levels  society  makes 
its  distinctions.  I  dare  say  that  the  servant  was  not 
suffered  to  eat  with  the  others  when  they  had  any- 
thing to  eat,  and  that  when  they  had  nothing  her  in- 
feriority was  somehow  brought  home  to  her.  She  may 
have  been  made  to  wait  and  famish  after  the  others  had 
hungered  some  time.  She  was  a  cheerful  and  friend- 
ly creature,  and  her  small  brood  were  kept  tidy  like 
herself. 

The  basement  under  this  vacant  tenement  we  found 
inhabited,  and,  though  it  was  a  most  preposterous  place 
for  people  to  live,  it  was  not  as  dirty  as  one  would 
think.  To  be  sure,  it  was  not  very  light  and  all  the 
dirt  may  not  have  been  visible.  One  of  the  smiling 
women  who  were  there  made  their  excuses,  "  Poor  peo- 
ple; cannot  keep  very  nice,"  and  laughed  as  if  she 
had  said  a  good  thing.  There  was  nothing  in  the 
room  but  a  table  and  a  few  chairs  and  a  stove,  with- 
out fire,  but  they  were  all  contentedly  there  together 
in  the  dark,  which  hardly  let  them  see  one  another's 
faces.  My  companion  struck  a  match  and  held  it  to 

104 


AN    EAST-SIDE    KAMBLE 

the  cavernous  mouth  of  an  inner  cellar  half  as  large 
as  the  room  we  were  in,  where  it  winked  and  paled  so 
soon  that  I  had  only  a  glimpse  of  the  bed,  with  the 
rounded  heap  of  bedding  on  it;  but  out  of  this  hole, 
as  if  she  had  been  a  rat,  scared  from  it  by  the  light, 
a  young  girl  came,  rubbing  her  eyes  and  vaguely  smil- 
ing, and  vanished  up-stairs  somewhere. 


IV 


I  found  no  shape  or  size  of  tenement  but  this.  There 
was  always  the  one  room,  where  the  inmates  lived  by 
day,  and  the  one  den,  where  they  slept  by  night,  ap- 
parently all  in  the  same  bed,  though  probably  the  chil- 
dren were  strewn  about  the  floor.  If  the  tenement  were 
high  up,  the  living-room  had  more  light  and  air  than 
if  it  were  low  down;  but  the  sleeping-hole  never  had 
any  light  or  air  of  its  own.  My  calls  were  made  on 
one  of  the  mild  days  which  fell  before  last  Christmas, 
and  so  I  suppose  I  saw  these  places  at  their  best;  but 
what  they  must  be  when  the  summer  is  seven  times 
heated  without,  as  it  often  is  in  New  York,  or  when 
the  arctic  cold  has  pierced  these  hapless  abodes  and  the 
inmates  huddle  together  for  their  animal  heat,  the 
reader  must  imagine  for  himself.  The  Irish-Ameri- 
cans had  flaming  stoves,  even  on  that  soft  day,  but  in 
the  Hebrew  tenements  I  found  no  flre.  They  were 
doubtless  the  better  for  this,  and  it  is  one  of  the  com- 
ical anomalies  of  the  whole  affair  that  they  are  singu- 
larly healthy.  The  death-rate  among  them  is  one  of 
the  lowest  in  the  city,  though  whether  for  their  final 
advantage  it  might  not  better  be  the  highest,  is  one  of 
the  things  one  must  not  ask  one's  self.  In  their  pres- 
ence I  should  not  dare  to  ask  it,  even  in  my  deepest 

105 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

thought.  They  are  then  so  like  other  human  beings 
and  really  so  little  different  from  the  best,  except  in 
their  environment,  that  I  had  to  get  away  from  this 
before  I  could  regard  them  as  wild  beasts. 

I  suppose  there  are  and  have  been  worse  conditions 
of  life,  but  if  I  stopped  short  of  savage  life  I  found 
it  hard  to  imagine  them.  I  did  not  exaggerate  to  my- 
self the  squalor  that  I  saw,  and  I  do  not  exaggerate  it 
to  the  reader.  As  I  have  said,  I  was  so  far  from  sen- 
timentalizing it  that  I  almost  immediately  reconciled 
myself  to  it,  as  far  as  its  victims  were  concerned.  Still, 
it  was  squalor  of  a  kind  which,  it  seemed  to  me,  it 
could  not  be  possible  to  outrival  anywhere  in  the  life 
one  commonly  calls  civilized.  It  is  true  that  the  Ind- 
ians who  formerly  inhabited  this  island  were  no  more 
comfortably  lodged  in  their  wigwams  of  bark  and  skins 
than  these  poor  New- Yorkers  in  their  tenements.  But 
the  wild  men  pay  no  rent,  and  if  they  are  crowded  to- 
gether upon  terms  that  equally  forbid  decency  and  com- 
fort in  their  shelter,  they  have  the  freedom  of  the  forest 
and  the  prairie  about  them;  they  have  the  illimitable 
sky  and  the  whole  light  of  day  and  the  four  winds  to 
breathe  when  they  issue  into  the  open  air.  The  New 
York  tenement  dwellers,  even  when  they  leave  their 
lairs,  are  still  pent  in  their  high-walled  streets,  and 
inhale  a  thousand  stenches  of  their  own  and  others' 
making.  The  street,  except  in  snow  and  rain,  is  al- 
ways better  than  their  horrible  houses,  and  it  is  doubt- 
less because  they  pass  so  much  of  their  time  in  the 
street  that  the  death-rate  is  so  low  among  them.  Per- 
haps their  domiciles  can  be  best  likened  for  darkness 
and  discomfort  to  the  dugouts  or  sod  huts  of  the  set- 
tlers on  the  great  plains.  But  these  are  only  tem- 
porary shelters,  while  the  tenement  dwellers  have  no 
hope  of  better  housing;  thev  have  neither  the  prospect 

106 


AN    EAST-SIDE    RAMBLE 

of  a  happier  fortune  through,  their  own  energy  as  the 
settlers  have,  nor  any  chance  from  the  humane  efforts 
and  teachings  of  missionaries,  like  the  savages.  With 
the  tenement  dwellers  it  is  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion, if  not  for  the  individual,  then  for  the  class,  since 
no  one  expects  that  there  will  not  always  be  tenement 
dwellers  in  New  York  as  long  as  our  present  econom- 
ical conditions  endure. 


When  I  first  set  out  on  my  calls  I  provided  myself 
with  some  small  silver,  which  I  thought  I  might  fitly 
give,  at  least  to  the  children,  and  in  some  of  the  first 
places  I  did  this.  But  presently  I  began  to  fancy  an 
unseemliness  in  it,  as  if  it  were  an  indignity  added  to 
the  hardship  of  their  lot,  and  to  feel  that  unless  I  gave 
all  my  worldly  wealth  to  them  I  was  in  a  manner 
mocking  their  misery.  I  could  not  give  everything, 
for  then  I  should  have  had  to  come  upon  charity  my- 
self, and  so  I  mostly  kept  my  little  coins  in  my  pocket ; 
but  when  we  mounted  into  the  court  again  from  that 
cellar  apartment  and  found  an  old,  old  woman  there, 
wrinkled  and  yellow,  with  twinkling  eyes  and  a  tooth- 
less smile,  waiting  to  see  us,  as  if  she  were  as  curious 
in  her  way  as  we  were  in  ours,  I  was  tempted.  She 
said  in  her  Yiddish,  which  the  humorous  boy  inter- 
preted, that  she  was  eighty  years  old,  and  she  looked 
a  hundred,  while  she  babbled  unintelligibly  but  very 
cheerfully  on.  I  gave  her  a  piece  of  twenty-five  cents 
and  she  burst  into  a  blessing  that  I  should  not  have 
thought  could  be  bought  for  money.  We  did  not  stay 
to  hear  it  out,  but  the  boy  did,  and  he  followed  to  re- 
port it  to  me,  with  a  gleeful  interest  in  its  beneficent 

107 


IMPEESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

exaggerations.  If  it  is  fulfilled,  I  shall  live  to  be  a 
man  of  many  and  prosperous  years,  and  I  shall  die 
possessed  of  wealth  that  will  endow  a  great  many  col- 
leges and  found  a  score  of  libraries.  I  do  not  know 
whether  the  boy  envied  me  or  not,  but  I  wish  I  could 
have  left  that  benediction  to  him,  for  I  took  a  great 
liking  to  him,  his  shrewd  smile,  his  gay  eyes,  his 
promise  of  a  Hebrew  nose,  and  his  whole  wise  little 
visage.  He  said  that  he  went  to  school  and  studied 
reading,  writing,  geography,  and  everything.  All  the 
children  we  spoke  to  said  that  they  went  to  school,  and 
they  were  quick  and  intelligent.  They  could  mostly 
speak  English,  while  most  of  their  elders  knew  only 
Yiddish. 

The  sound  of  this  was  around  us  on  the  street  we 
issued  into,  and  which  seemed  from  end  to  end  a  vast 
bazaar,  where  there  was  a  great  deal  of  selling,  whether 
there  was  much  buying  or  not.  The  place  is  humor- 
ously called  the  pig-market  by  the  Christians,  because 
everything  in  the  world  but  pork  is  to  be  found  there. 
To  me  its  activity  was  a  sorrowfully  amusing  satire 
upon  the  business  ideal  of  our  plutocratic  civilization. 
These  people  were  desperately  poor,  yet  they  preyed 
upon  one  another  in  their  commerce,  as  if  they  could 
be  enriched  by  selling  dear  or  buying  cheap.  So  far 
as  I  could  see,  they  would  only  impoverish  one  another 
more  and  more,  but  they  trafficked  as  eagerly  as  if 
there  were  wealth  in  every  bargain.  The  sidewalks 
and  the  roadways  were  thronged  with  peddlers  and 
purchasers,  and  everywhere  I  saw  splendid  types  of 
that  old  Hebrew  world  which  had  the  sense  if  not  the 
knowledge  of  God  wrhen  all  the  rest  of  us  lay  sunk  in 
heathen  darkness.  There  were  women  with  oval  faces 
and  olive  tints,  and  clear,  dark  eyes,  relucent  as  even- 
ing pools,  and  men  with  long  beards  of  jetty  black  or 

108 


AN    EAST-SIDE    KAMBLE 

silvery  white  and  the  noble  profiles  of  their  race.  I 
said  to  myself  that  it  was  among  such  throngs  that 
Christ  walked,  it  was  from  such  people  that  he  chose 
his  Disciples  and  his  friends;  hut  I  looked  in  vain  for 
him  in  Hester  Street.  Probably  he  was  at  that  mo- 
ment in  Fifth  Avenue. 


VI 


After  all,  I  was  loath  to  -come  away.  I  should  have 
liked  to  stay  and  live  awhile  with  such  as  they,  if  the 
terms  of  their  life  had  been  possible,  for  there  were 
phases  of  it  that  were  very  attractive.  That  constant 
meeting  and  that  neighborly  intimacy  were  superfi- 
cially, at  least,  of  a  very  pleasant  effect,  and,  though 
the  whole  place  seemed  abandoned  to  mere  trade,  it 
may  have  been  a  necessity  of  the  case,  for  I  am  told 
that  many  of  these  Hebrews  have  another  ideal,  and 
think  and  vote  in  the  hope  that  the  land  of  their  refuge 
shall  yet  some  day  keep  its  word  to  the  world,  so  that 
men  shall  be  equally  free  in  it  to  the  pursuit  of  hap- 
piness. I  suppose  they  are  mostly  fugitives  from  the 
Russian  persecution,  and  that  from  the  cradle  their 
days  must  have  been  full  of  fear  and  care,  and  from 
the  time  they  could  toil  that  they  must  have  toiled  at 
whatever  their  hands  found  to  do.  Yet  they  had  not 
the  look  of  a  degraded  people;  they  were  quiet  and 
orderly,  and  I  saw  none  of  the  drunkenness  or  the 
truculence  of  an  Irish  or  low  American  neighborhood 
among  them.  There  were  no  policemen  in  sight,  and 
the  quiet  behavior  that  struck  me  so  much  seemed  not 
to  have  been  enforced.  Very  likely  they  may  have 
moods  different  from  that  I  saw,  but  I  only  tell  of 
what  I  saw,  and  I  am  by  no  means  ready  yet  to  preach 

109 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

poverty  as  a  saving  grace.  Though  they  seemed  so 
patient  and  even  cheerful  in  some  cases,  I  do  not  think 
it  is  well  for  human  beings  to  live  whole  families  to- 
gether in  one  room  with  a  kennel  out  of  it,  where  mod- 
esty may  survive,  but  decency  is  impossible.  Neither 
do  I  think  they  can  be  the  better  men  and  women  for 
being  insufficiently  clothed  and  fed,  though  so  many  of 
us  appear  none  the  better  for  being  housed  in  palaces 
and  clad  in  purple  and  fine  linen  and  faring  sumptu- 
ously every  day. 

I  have  tried  to  report  simply  and  honestly  what  I 
saw  of  the  life  of  our  poorest  people  that  day.  One 
might  say  it  was  hot  so  bad  as  it  is  painted,  but  I 
think  it  is  quite  as  bad  as  it  appeared ;  and  I  could  not 
see  that  in  itself  or  in  its  conditions  it  held  the  prom- 
ise or  the  hope  of  anything  better.  If  it  is  tolerable, 
it  must  endure ;  if  it  is  intolerable,  still  it  must  endure. 
Here  and  there  one  Avill  release  himself  from  it,  and 
doubtless  numbers  are  always  doing  this,  as  in  the  days 
of  slavery  there  were  always  fugitives;  but  for  the 
great  mass  the  captivity  remains.  Upon  the  present 
terms  of  leaving  the  poor  to  be  housed  by  private  land- 
lords, whose  interest  it  is  to  get  the  greatest  return  of 
money  for  the  money  invested,  the  very  poorest  must 
always  be  housed  as  they  are  now.  Nothing  but  pub- 
lic control  in  some  form  or  other  can  secure  them  a 
shelter  fit  for  human  beings. 


TRIBULATIONS  OF  A  CHEERFUL  GIVER 

SOME  months  ago,  as  I  was  passing  through  a  down- 
town street  on  my  way  to  the  elevated  station,  I  saw 
a  man  sitting  on  the  steps  o'f  a  house.  He  seemed  to 
be  resting  his  elbows  on  his  knees  and  holding  out 
both  his  hands.  As  I  came  nearer  I  perceived  that  he 
had  no  hands,  but  only  stumps,  where  the  fingers  had 
been  cut  off  close  to  the  palms,  and  that  it  was  these 
stumps  he  was  holding  out  in  the  mute  appeal  which 
was  his  form  of  begging.  Otherwise  he  did  not  ask 
charity.  When  I  approached  him  he  did  not  look  up, 
and  when  I  stopped  in  front  of  him  he  did  not  speak. 
I  thought  this  rather  fine,  in  its  way;  except  for  his 
mutilation,  which  the  man  really  could  not  help,  there 
was  nothing  to  offend  the  taste;  and  his  immobile  si- 
lence was  certainly  impressive. 

I  decided  at  once  to  give  him  something;  for  when 
I  am  in  the  presence  of  want,  or  even  the  appearance 
of  want,  there  is  something  that  says  to  me,  "  Give  to 
him  that  asketh,"  and  I  have  to  give,  or  else  go  away 
with  a  bad  conscience — a  thing  I  hate.  Of  course  I 
do  not  give  much,  for  I  wish  to  be  a  good  citizen  as 
well  as  a  good  Christian;  and,  as  soon  as  I  obey  that 
voice  which  I  cannot  disobey,  I  hear  another  voice  re- 
proaching me  for  encouraging  street  beggary.  I  have 
been  taught  that  street  beggary  is  wrong,  and  when  I 
have  to  unbutton  two  coats  and  go  through  three  or 

four  pockets  before  I  can  reach  the  small  coin  I  mean. 

ill 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

to  give  in  compliance  with  that  imperative  voice  I 
certainly  feel  it  to  be  wrong.  So  I  compromise,  and 
I  am  never  able  to  make  sure  that  either  of  those 
voices  is  satisfied  with  me.  I  am  not  even  satisfied 
with  myself;  but  I  am  better  satisfied  than  if  I  gave 
nothing.  That  was  the  selfish  reason  I  now  had  for 
deciding  to  yield  to  my  better  nature,  and  to  obey 
the  voice  which  bade  me  "  Give  to  him  that  asketh  " ; 
for,  as  I  said,  I  hate  a  bad  conscience,  and  of  two  bad 
consciences  I  always  choose  the  least,  which  in  a  case 
like  this  is  the  one  that  incensed  political  economy 
gives  me. 


I  put  my  hand  into  my  hip-pocket,  where  I  keep 
my  silver,  and  found  nothing  there  but  half  a  dollar. 
This  at  once  changed  the  whole  current  of  my  feel- 
ings: and  it  was  not  chill  penury  that  repressed  my 
noble  rage,  but  chill  affluence.  It  was  manifestly  wrong 
to  give  half  a  dollar  to  a  man  who  had  no  hands,  or  to 
any  sort  of  beggar.  I  was  willing  to  commit  a  small 
act  of  incivism,  but  I  had  not  the  courage  to  flout  po- 
litical economy  to  the  extent  of  fifty  cents;  and  I  felt 
that  when  I  was  bidden  "  Give  to  him  that  asketh,"  I 
was  never  meant  to  give  so  much  as  a  half-dollar,  but 
a  cent  or  a  half-dime  or,  at  the  most,  a  quarter.  I 
wished  I  had  a  quarter.  I  would  gladly  have  given  a 
quarter,  but  there  was  nothing  in  my  pocket  but  that 
fatal,  that  inexorably  indivisible  half-dollar,  the  conti- 
nent of  two  quarters,  but  not  practically  a  quarter.  I 
would  have  asked  anybody  in  sight  to  change  it  for 
me,  but  there  was  no  one  passing ;  it  was  a  quiet  street 
of  brown-stone  dwellings,  and  not  a  thronged  thorough- 
fare at  anv  time.  At  that  hour  of  the  late  afternoon 

112 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A   CHEERFUL    GIVER 

it  was  deserted,  except  for  the  beggar  and  myself ;  and 
I  am  not  sure  that  he  had  any  business  to  be  sitting 
there  on  the  steps  of  another  man's  house,  or  that  I 
had  the  right  to  encourage  his  invasion  by  giving  him 
anything.  For  a  moment  I  did  not  know  quite  what 
to  do.  To  be  sure,  I  was  not  bound  to  the  man  in  any 
way.  He  had  not  asked  me  for  charity,  and  I  had 
barely  paused  before  him ;  I  could  go  on  and  ignore 
the  incident.  I  thought  of  doing  this,  but  then  I 
thought  of  the  bad  conscience  I  should  be  certain  to 
have,  and  I  could  not  go  cm.  I  glanced  across  the 
street,  and  near  the  corner  I  saw  a  decent-looking  res- 
taurant ;  and  "  Wait  a  minute,"  I  said  to  the  man,  as 
if  he  were  likely  to  go  away,  and  I  ran  across  to  get 
my  half-dollar  changed  at  the  restaurant. 

I  was  now  quite  resolved  to  give  him  a  quarter  and 
be  done  with  it;  the  thing  was  getting  to  be  a  bore. 
But,  when  I  entered  the  restaurant,  I  saw  no  one  there 
but  a  young  man  quite  at  the  end  of  a  long  room ;  and 
when  he  had  come  all  the  way  forward  to  find  what  I 
wanted  I  was  ashamed  to  ask  him  to  change  my  half- 
dollar,  and  I  pretended  that  I  wanted  a  package  of 
Sweet  Caporal  cigarettes,  which  I  did  not  want,  and 
which  it  was  a  pure  waste  for  me  to  buy,  since  I  do 
not  smoke,  though  doubtless  it  was  better  to  buy  them 
and  encourage  commerce  than  to  give  the  half-dollar 
and  encourage  beggary.  At  any  rate,  I  instinctively 
felt  that  I  had  political  economy  on  my  side  in  the 
transaction,  and  I  made  haste  to  go  back  to  the  man 
on  the  steps,  and  secure  myself  with  Christian  charity, 
too.  On  the  way  over  to  him,  however,  I  decided  that 
I  would  not  give  him  a  quarter,  and  I  ended  by  pois- 
ing fifteen  cents  on  one  of  his  out-stretched  stumps. 

He  seemed  very  grateful,  and  thanked  me  earnestly, 

with  a  little  note  of  surprise  in  his  voice,  as  if  he  were 

113 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

not  used  to  such  splendid  charity  as  that ;  and,  in  fact, 
I  suppose  very  few  people  gave  so  handsomely  to  him. 
He  spoke  with  a  German  accent;  and  when  I  asked 
him  how  he  had  lost  his  hands  he  answered,  "  Frost. 
Frozen  off,  here  in  the  city."  I  could  not  go  on  and 
ask  him  for  further  particulars,  for  I  thought  it  but 
too  likely  that  he  had  been  drunk  when  exposed  to 
weather  that  would  freeze  one's  hands  off,  and  that  he 
was  now  paying  the  penalty  of  his  debauchery.  I  was 
in  no  wise  so  much  at  peace  with  myself  as  I  had  ex- 
pected to  be ;  and  I  was  still  less  so  when  a  young  girl 
halted  as  she  came  by,  and,  seeing  what  I  had  done, 
and  hearing  what  the  man  said,  put  a  dime  on  the 
other  stump.  She  looked  poor  herself;  her  sack  was 
quite  shabby  about  the  seams.  I  did  not  think  she 
could  afford  to  give  so  much  to  a  single  beggar,  and  I 
was  aware  of  having  tempted  her  to  the  excess  by  my 
own  profusion.  If  she  had  seen  me  giving  the  man 
only  a  nickel,  she  would  perhaps  have  given  him  a 
cent,  which  was  probably  all  she  could  afford. 


II 


I  came  away  feeling  indescribably  squalid.  I  per- 
ceived now  that  I  could  have  taken  my  stand  upon  the 
high  ground  of  discouraging  street  beggary,  and  given, 
nothing;  but,  having  once  lowered  myself  to  the  level 
of  the  early  Christians,  I  ought  to  have  given  the  half- 
dollar.  It  did  not  console  me  to  remember  the  sur- 
prise in  the  man's  gratitude,  and  to  reflect  that  I  had 
probably  given  him  at  least  three  times  as  much  as  he 
usually  got  from  the  tenderest-hearted  people.  I  per- 
ceived that  I  had  been  the  divinely  appointed  bearer 
of  half  a  dollar  to  his  mutilation  and  his  misery,  and  I 

114 


TRIBULATIONS    OF   A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

had  given  him  fifteen  cents  out  of  it,  and  wasted  ten, 
and  kept  the  other  twenty-five;  in  other  words,  I  had 
embezzled  the  greater  part  of  the  money  intrusted  to 
me  for  him. 

When  I  got  home  and  told  them  at  dinner  just  what 
I  had  done,  they  all  agreed  that  I  had  done  a  mighty 
shabby  thing.  I  do  not  know  whether  the  reader  will 
agree  with  them  or  not — perhaps  I  would  rather  not 
know;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  I  shall  not  ask  him  what 
he  would  have  done  in  the  like  case.  !Now  that  it  is 
laid  before  him  in  all  its  sh'ameless  nakedness,  I  dare 
say  he  will  pretend  that  he  would  have  given  the  half- 
dollar.  But  I  doubt  if  he  would:  and  there  is  a  curi- 
our  principle  governing  this  whole  matter  of  giving, 
which  I  would  like  him  to  consider  with  me.  Charity 
is  a  very  simple  thing  when  you  look  at  it  from  the 
stand-point  of  the  good  Christian,  but  it  is  very  com- 
plex when  you  look  at  it  from  the  stand-point  of  the 
good  citizen;  and  there  seems  to  be  an  instinctive  ef- 
fort on  our  part  to  reconcile  two  duties  by  a  certain 
proportion  which  we  observe  in  giving.  Whether  we 
say  so  to  ourselves  or  not,  we  behave  as  if  it  would  be 
the  wildest  folly  to  give  at  all  in  the  measure  Christ 
bade;  and  by  an  apt  psychological  juggle  we  adjust 
our  succor  to  the  various  degrees  of  need  that  present 
themelves.  To  the  absolutely  destitute  it  is  plain  that 
anything  will  be  better  than  nothing,  and  so  we  give 
the  smallest  charity  to  those  who  need  charity  most. 
I  dare  say  people  will  deny  this,  but  it  is  true,  all  the 
same,  as  the  reader  will  allow  when  he  thinks  about  it. 
We  act  upon  a  kind  of  logic  in  the  matter,  though  I 
do  not  suppose  many  act  consciously  upon  it.  Here 
is  a  man  whispering  to  you  in  the  dark  that  he  has 
not  had  anything  to  eat  all  day,  and  does  not  know 
where  to  sleep.  Shall  you  give  him  a  dollar  to  get  a 

9  115 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

good  supper  and  a  decent  lodging?  Certainly  not: 
you  shall  give  him  a  dime,  and  trust  that  some  one 
else  will  give  him  another ;  or,  if  you  have  some  charity 
tickets  about  you,  then  you  give  him  one  of  them,  and 
go  away  feeling  that  you  have  at  once  befriended  and 
outwitted  him  ;  for  the  supposition  is  that  he  is  a  fraud, 
and  has  been  trying  to  work  you. 

This  is  not  a  question  which  affects  the  excellence 
of  the  charities  system.  I  know  how  good  and  kind 
and  just  that  is;  but  it  is  a  question  that  affects  the 
whole  Christian  philosophy  of  giving.  A  friend  whom 
I  was  talking  the  matter  over  with  was  inclined  to 
doubt  whether  Christ's  doctrine  was  applicable,  in  its 
sweeping  simplicity,  to  our  complex  modern  conditions ; 
whether  it  was  final,  whether  it  was  the  last  word,  as 
we  say.  Of  course,  it  does  seem  a  little  absurd  to  give 
to  him  that  asketh,  when  you  do  not  know  what  he 
is  going  to  do  with  the  money,  and  when  you  do  not 
know  whether  he  has  not  come  to  want  by  his  own 
fault,  or  whether  he  is  really  in  want. 


ITI 


I  must  say  that  his  statement  of  his  own  case  is 
usually  incoherent.  The  poor  fellows  have  very  little 
imagination  or  invention;  they  might  almost  as  well 
be  realistic  novelists.  I  find  that  those  who  strike  me 
for  a  night's  lodging,  when  they  stop  me  in  the  street 
at  night,  come  as  a  rule  from  Pittsburg,  and  are  iron- 
workers of  some  sort:  the  last  one  said  he  was  a  pud- 
dler,  "A  skilled  mechanic,"  he  explained — "what  is 
called  a  skilled  mechanic  " ;  and,  of  course,  he  was  only 
watching  for  some  chance  to  get  back  to  Pittsburg, 

though  there  was  no  chance  of  work,  from  what  he 

116 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A   CHEERFUL    GIVER 

told  me,  after  he  got  there.  On  the  other  hand,  I  find 
that  most  of  those  who  ask  by  day  for  money  to  get  a 
dinner  are  from  Philadelphia,  or  the  rural  parts  of 
eastern  Pennsylvania,  though  within  six  months  I  have 
extended  hospitality  (I  think  that  is  the  right  phrase) 
to  two  architectural  draftsmen  from  Boston.  They 
were  both  entirely  decent-looking,  sober-looking  young 
men,  who  spoke  like  men  of  education,  and  they  each 
gratefully  accepted  a  quarter  from  me.  I  do  not  at- 
tempt to  account  for  them,  for  they  made  no  attempt 
to  account  for  themselves;  afad  I  think  the  effect  was 
more  artistic  so. 

I  am  rarely  approached  by  any  professed  ISTew- York- 
er, which  is  perhaps  a  proof  of  the  superior  industry 
or  prosperity  of  our  city;  but  now  and  then  a  fellow- 
citizen  who  has  fallen  out  asks  me  for  money  in  the 
street,  and  perhaps  goes  straight  and  spends  it  for 
drink.  Drink,  however,  is  as  necessary  in  some  forms 
as  food  itself,  and  a  rich,  generous  port  wine  is  often 
prescribed  for  invalids.  These  men,  without  exception, 
look  like  invalids,  and  I  dare  say  that  they  would 
prefer  to  buy  a  rich,  generous  port  wine  if  I  gave 
them  money  enough.  I  never  do  that,  though  I  have 
a  means  of  making  my  alms  seem  greater,  to  myself 
at  least,  by  practising  a  little  cordiality  with  the  poor 
fellows.  I  do  not  give  grudgingly  or  silently,  but  I 
say,  if  I  give  at  all,  when  they  ask  me,  "  Why,  of 
course !"  or  "  Yes,  certainly  " ;  and  sometimes  I  invite 
them  to  use  their  feeble  powers  of  invention  in  my 
behalf,  and  tell  how  they  wish  me  to  think  they  have 
come  to  the  sad  pass  of  beggary.  This  seems  to  flatter 
them,  and  it  makes  me  feel  much  better,  which  is  really 
my  motive  for  doing  it. 

Now  and  then  they  will  offer  me  some  apology  for 
begging,  in  a  tone  that  says,  "  I  know  how  it  is  my- 

117 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

self  " ;  and  once  there  was  one  who  began  by  saying, 
"  I  know  it's  a  shame  for  a  strong  man  like  me  to  be 
begging,  but — "  They  seldom  have  any  devices  for 
working  me,  beyond  the  simple  statement  of  their  des- 
titution; though  there  was  a  case  in  which  I  helped  a 
poor  fellow  raise  a  quarter  upon  a  postal-order,  which 
he  then  kept  as  a  pledge  of  my  good  faith.  Their 
main  reliance  seems  to  be  lead  -  pencils,  which  they 
have  in  all  inferior  variety.  I  find  that  they  will  take 
it  kindly  if  you  do  not  want  any  change  back  when 
you  have  given  them  a  coin  worth  more  than  they  asked 
for  the  pencil,  and  that  they  will  even  let  you  off  with- 
out taking  the  pencil  after  you  have  bought  it.  In  the 
end  you  have  to  use  some  means  to  save  yourself  from 
the  accumulation  of  pencils,  unless  you  are  willing  to 
burn  them  for  kindling-wood;  and  I  find  the  simplest 
way  is  not  to  take  them  after  you  have  paid  for  them. 
It  is  amusing  how  quickly  you  can  establish  a  comity 
with  these  pencil  people;  they  will  not  only  let  you 
leave  your  pencils  with  them,  but  they  will  sometimes 
excuse  you  from  buying  if  you  remind  them  that  you 
have  bought  of  them  lately.  Then,  if  they  do  not  re- 
member you,  they  at  least  smile  politely  and  pretend 
to  do  so. 


IV 


Ought  one  to  give  money  to  a  hand-organist  who 
is  manifestly  making  himself  a  nuisance  before  the 
door  of  some  one  else?  I  have  asked  myself  this 
when  I  have  been  tempted,  and  I  am  not  yet  quite 
clear  about  it.  At  present,  therefore,  I  give  only  to 
the  inaudible  street  minstrels,  who  earn  an  honest  liv- 
ing and  make  no  noise  about  it.  I  cannot  think  that 
a  ballad-singer  on  Sixth  Avenue,  who  pours  forth  his 

118 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

artless  lay  amid  the  roar  and  rattle  of  the  elevated 
trains,  the  jangle  and  clatter  of  the  horse  -  cars,  the 
bang  of  the  grocers'  carts,  and  the  thunder  of  the  ex- 
press-wagons, is  practically  molesting  anybody;  and  I 
believe  that  one  can  reward  his  innocent  efforts  with- 
out wronging  his  neighbors.  It  is  always  amusing  to 
have  him  stop  in  his  most  effective  phrase  to  say, 
"  Thank  you,  thank  you,  sir,"  and  then  go  on  again. 
The  other  day,  as  I  dropped  my  contribution  into  the 
extended  hat,  I  asked,  "How  is  business?"  and  the 
singer  interrupted  himself  to' answer,  "  Xothing-to-brag- 
of-sir-thank-you,"  and  resumed  with  continuous  ten- 
derness, the  "  ditty  of  no  tone  "  that  he  was  piping  to 
the  inattentive  uproar  of  the  street. 

It  may  be  doubted  whether  a  balladist  who  is  not 
making  himself  heard  is  earning  his  money;  but,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  may  be  asked  if  he  is  not  less  regret- 
table for  that  reason.  A  great  many  good  people  do 
not  earn  their  money,  and  yet  by  universal  consent 
they  seem  to  have  a  right  to  it.  We  cannot  oblige 
the  poor  to  earn  their  money  any  more  than  the  rich, 
without  attacking  the  principle  on  which  society  is 
based  and  classing  ourselves  with  its  enemies.  If 
people  get  money  out  of  other  people,  we  ought  not 
to  ask  how  they  get  it,  whether  it  is  much  or  little; 
and  I,  at  any  rate,  will  not  scan  too  closely  the  honesty 
of  the  inaudible  balladist  of  the  avenue.  Neither  will 
I  question  the  gains  of  those  silentious  minstrels  who 
grind  small,  mute  organs  at  the  corners  of  the  pave- 
ment, with  a  little  tin  cup  beside  them  to  receive  trib- 
ute. They  are  usually  old,  old  women,  and  I  suppose 
Italians;  but  they  seem  not  to  be  very  distinctively 
anything.  How  they  can  sit  upon  the  cold  stone  all 
day  long  without  taking  their  deaths,  passes  me  to  say ; 

and  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  they  do  really  earn 

119 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

their  money,  if  not  as  minstrels,  then  as  monuments 
of  human  endurance.  The  average  American  grand- 
mother would  sneeze  in  five  seconds,  under  the  same 
conditions,  and  be  laid  up  for  the  rest  of  the  winter. 
But  these  hardy  aliens  remain  unaffected  by  cold  or 
wet,  light  or  dark.  One  night  I  came  upon  one  sleep- 
ing on  her  curbstone, — such  a  small,  dull  wad  of  out- 
worn womanhood! — her  gray  old  head  bent  upon  her 
knees,  and  her  withered  arms  wound  in  her  thin  shawl. 
It  was  very  chill  that  night,  with  a  sharp  wind  sweep- 
ing the  street  that  the  Street  Department  had  neg- 
lected; but  this  poor  old  thing  slept  on,  while  I  stood 
by  her  trying  to  imagine  her  short  and  simple  annals : 
a  dim,  far-off  childhood  in  some  peasant  hut,  a  girlhood 
with  its  tender  dreams,  a  motherhood  with  its  cares,  a 
grandmotherhood  with  its  pains — the  whole  round  of 
woman's  life,  with  want  through  all,  wound  into  this 
last  resiilt  of  houseless  age  at  my  feet.  How  much  of 
human  life  comes  to  no  more — if,  indeed,  one  ought 
not  to  say  how  little  comes  to  so  much!  I  sighed,  as 
people  of  feeling  used  to  do  it  in  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  dropped  a  dime  into  the  tin  cup.  The  sound 
startled  the  beldame,  and  I  hope  that  before  she  woke 
and  looked  up  at  me  she  had  time  to  dream  riches  and 
luxury  for  the  rest  of  her  life.  "Bella  musical"  I 
said,  with  a  fine  irony,  and  she  smiled  and  shrugged, 
and  began  to  feel  for  the  handle  of  her  organ,  as  if 
she  were  willing  to  begin  giving  me  my  money's  worth 
on  the  spot.  If  we  did  not  see  such  sights  every  day 
how  impossible  they  would  seem ! 


y 

The  whole  spectacle  of  poverty,  indeed,  is  incredi- 
ble.   As  soon  as  you  cease  to  have  it  before  your  eyes, 

120 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

— even  when  you  have  it  before  your  eyes, — you  can 
hardly  believe  it,  and  that  is  perhaps  why  so  many 
people  deny  that  it  exists,  or  is  much  more  than  a 
superstition  of  the  sentimentalist.  When  I  get  back 
into  my  own  comfortable  room,  among  my  papers  and 
books,  I  remember  it  as  I  remember  something  at  the 
theatre.  It  seems  to  be  turned  off,  as  Niagara,  does, 
when  you  come  away.  The  diificulty  here  in  New 
York  is  that  the  moment  you  go  out  again  you  find 
it  turned  on,  full  tide.  I  used  to  live  in  a  country 
supposed  to  be  peculiarly  infested  by  beggars;  but  I 
believe  I  was  not  so  much  asked  for  charity  in  Venice 
as  I  am  in  New  York.  There  are  as  many  beggars  on 
our  streets  as  in  Venice,  and,  as  for  the  organized  ef- 
forts to  get  at  one's  compassion,  there  is  no  parallel  for 
New  York  anywhere.  The  letters  asking  aid  for  air 
funds,  salt  and  fresh,  for  homes  and  shelters,  for  read- 
ing-rooms and  eating-rooms,  for  hospitals  and  refuges, 
for  the  lame,  halt,  and  blind,  for  the  old,  for  the  young, 
for  the  anhungered  and  ashamed,  of  all  imaginable  de- 
scriptions, storm  in  with  every  mail,  so  that  one  hates 
to  open  one's  letters  nowadays;  for  instead  of  finding 
a  pleasant  line  from  a  friend,  one  finds  an  appeal,  in 
print  imitating  typewriting,  from  several  of  the  mil- 
lionaires in  the  city  for  aid  of  some  good  object  to 
which  they  have  lent  the  influence  of  their  signatures, 
and  enclosing  an  envelope,  directed  but  not  stamped, 
for  your  subscription.  You  do  not  escape  from  the 
proof  of  poverty  even  by  keeping  in-doors  amid  your 
own  luxurious  environment ;  besides,  your  digestion  be- 
comes impaired,  and  you  have  to  go  out,  if  you  are 
to  have  any  appetite  for  your  dinner;  and  then  the 
trouble  begins  on  other  terms. 

One  of  my  minor  difficulties,  if  I  may  keep  on  con- 
fessing myself  to  the  reader,  is  a  very  small  pattern  of 

121 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

newsboys,  whom  I  am  tempted  to  make  keep  the  change 
when  I  get  a  one-cent  paper  of  them  and  give  them 
a  five-cent  piece.  I  see  men,  well  dressed,  well  brushed, 
with  the  air  of  being  exemplary  citizens,  fathers  of 
families,  and  pillars  of  churches,  wait  patiently  or  im- 
patiently, while  these  little  fellows  search  one  pocket 
and  another  for  the  pennies  due,  or  run  to  some  com- 
rade Chonnie  or  Chimmie  for  them;  and  I  cannot  help 
feeling  that  I  may  be  doing  something  very  disor- 
ganizing or  demoralizing  in  failing  to  demand  my 
change.  At  first  I  used  to  pass  on  without  apparently 
noticing  that  I  had  given  too  much,  but  I  perceived 
that  then  these  small  wretches  sometimes  winked  to 
their  friends,  in  the  belief  that  they  had  cheated  me; 
and  now  I  let  them  offer  to  get  the  change  before  I  let 
them  keep  it.  I  may  be  undermining  society,  and 
teaching  them  to  trust  in  a  fickle  fortune  rather  than 
their  own  enterprise,  by  overpaying  them;  but  at  least 
I  will  not  corrupt  them. by  letting  them  think  they 
have  taken  advantage  of  my  ignorance.  If  the  reader 
will  not  whisper  it  again,  I  will  own  that  I  have  some- 
times paid  as  high  as  ten  cents  for  a  one-cent  paper, 
which  I  did  not  want,  when  it  has  been  offered  me  by 
a  very  minute  neAvsboy  near  midnight;  and  I  have 
done  this  in  conscious  defiance  of  the  well-known  fact 
that  it  is  a  ruse  of  very  minute  newsboys  to  be  out 
late  when  they  ought  to  be  in  bed  at  home,  or  at  the 
Home  (which  seems  different),  in  order  to  work  the 
sympathies  of  unwary  philanthropists.  The  statistics 
in  regard  to  these  miscreants  are  as  unquestionable  as 
those  relating  to  street  beggars  who  have  amassed  fort- 
unes and  died  amid  rags  and  riches  of  dramatic  char- 
acter. I  am  sorry  that  I  cannot  say  where  the  statistics 
are  to  be  found. 


TRIBULATIONS    OF   A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

VI 

The  actual  practice  of  fraud,  even  when  you  dis- 
cover it,  must  give  you  interesting  question,  unless  you 
are  cock-sure  of  your  sociology.  I  was  once  met  by  a 
little  girl  on  a  cross-street  in  a  respectable  quarter  of 
the  town,  who  burst  into  tears  at  sight  of  me,  and 
asked  for  money  to  buy  her  sick  mother  bread.  The 
very  next  day  I  was  passing  through  the  same  street, 
and  I  saw  the  same  little  girl  burst  into  tears  at  the 
sight  of  a  benevolent-looking"  lady,  whom  undoubtedly 
she  asked  for  money  for  the  same  good  object.  The 
benevolent-looking  lady  gave  her  nothing,  and  she  tried 
her  woes  upon  several  other  people,  none  of  whom 
gave  her  anything.  I  was  forced  to  doubt  whether, 
upon  the  whole,  her  game  was  worth  the  candle,  or 
whether  she  was  really  making  a  provision  for  her  de- 
clining years  by  this  means.  To  be  sure,  her  time 
was  not  worth  much,  and  she  could  hardly  have  got 
any  other  work,  she  was  so  young;  but  it  seemed 
hardly  a  paying  industry.  By  any  careful  calculation, 
I  do  not  believe  she  would  have  been  found  to  have 
amassed  more  than  ten  or  fifteen  cents  a  day;  and 
perhaps  she  really  had  a  sick  mother  at  home.  Many 
persons  are  obliged  to  force  their  emotions  for  money 
whom  we  should  not  account  wholly  undeserving;  yet 
I  suppose  a  really  good  citizen  who  found  this  little 
girl  trying  to  cultivate  the  sympathies  of  charitable 
people  by  that  system  of  irrigation  would  have  had 
her  suppressed  as  an  impostor. 

In  a  way  she  was  an  impostor,  though  her  sick  moth- 
er may  have  been  starving,  as  she  said.  It  is  a  nice 
question.  Shall  we  always  give  to  him  that  asketh? 
Or  shall  we  give  to  him  that  asketh  only  when  we 
know  that  he  has  come  by  his  destitution  honestly? 

123 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

In  other  words,  what  is  a  deserving  case  of  charity — 
or,  rather,  what  is  not  ? .  Is  a  starving  or  freezing  per- 
son to  be  denied  because  he  or  she  is  drunken  or  vicious  ? 
What  is  desert  in  the  poor?  What  is  desert  in  the 
rich,  I  suppose  the  reader  would  answer.  If  this  is 
so,  and  if  we  ought  not  to  succor  an  undeserving  poor 
person,  then  we  ought  not  to  succor  an  undeserving 
rich  person.  It  will  be  said  that  a  rich  person,  how- 
ever undeserving,  will  never  be  in  need  of  our  succor, 
but  this  is  not  so  clear.  If  we  saw  a  rich  person  fall 
in  a  fit  before  the  horses  of  a  Fifth  Avenue  omnibus, 
ought  not  we  to  run  and  lift  him  up,  although  we 
knew  him  to  be  a  man  whose  life  was  stained  by  every 
vice  and  excess,  and  cruel,  wanton,  idle,  luxurious? 
I  know  that  I  am  imagining  a  quite  impossible  rich 
person;  but,  once  imagined,  ought  not  we  to  save  him 
all  the  same  as  if  he  were  deserving?  I  do  not  be- 
lieve the  most  virtuous  person  will  say  we  ought  not; 
and  ought  not  we,  then,  to  rescue  the  most  worthless 
tramp  fallen  under  the  wheels  of  the  Juggernaut  of 
want  ?  Is  charity  the  reward  of  merit  ? 


VII 


My  friend  who  was  not  sure  that  Christ's  doctrine 
was  the  last  word  in  regard  to  charity  was  quite  sure 
that  you  ought  to  have  a  conscience  against  dead-beats, 
whom  I  suggested  for  his  consideration,  especially  the 
dead-beats  who  come  to  your  house  and  try  to  work 
you  upon  one  pretext  or  another.  He  said  he  never 
gave  to  them,  and  I  asked  what  he  answered  them 
when  they  professed  themselves  in  instant  want;  and 
whether  he  plumply  denied  them;  and  it  appeared 

that  he  told  them  he  had  other  uses  for  his  money.    I 

124 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A   CHEERFUL    GIVER 

suspect  this  was  a  proper  answer  to  make.  It  had 
never  occurred  to  me,  but  I  think  I  will  try  it  with 
the  next  one  who  comes,  and  see  what  effect  it  has 
upon  him.  Hitherto  I  have  had  no  better  way  than  to 
offer  them  a  compromise:  if  they  ask  twenty,  to  pro- 
pose ten ;  and,  if  they  ask  ten,  to  propose  five ;  and  so 
on  down.  The  first  time  I  did  this  (it  was  with  an 
actor,  who  gave  me  his  I  O  IT — the  first  and  only  I  O  IT 
that  I  ever  got:  I  suppose  he  was  used  to  giving  it 
on  the  stage)  it  seemed  to  me  that  I  had  made  ten 
dollars,  and  since  then  it  nas  seemed  to  me  that  I 
made  five  dollars  on  several  occasions :  but  I  now  think 
this  was  an  illusion,  and  that  I  only  saved  the  money: 
I  did  not  actually  add  to  my  store. 

It  is  usually  indigent  literature  which  presents  itself 
with  these  imaginative  demands,  and  I  think  usually 
fictionists  of  the  romantic  school.  I  do  not  know  but 
it  would  be  well  for  me  as  a  man  of  principle  to  con- 
fine my  benefactions  to  destitute  realists :  I  am  sure  it 
would  be  cheaper.  Last  winter  there  came  to  me  a 
gentleman  thrown  out  of  employment  by  the  comple- 
tion of  an  encyclopsedia  he  had  been  at  work  on,  and 
he  said  that  he  was  in  absolute  want  of  food  for  his 
family,  who  had  that  morning  been  set  out  with  all 
his  household  stuff  on  the  sidewalk  for  default  of  rent. 
I  relieved  his  immediate  necessity,  and  suggested  to 
him  that  if  he  would  write  a  simple,  unrhetorical  ac- 
count of  his  eviction  I  could  probably  sell  it  for  him; 
that  this  sort  of  thing  mostly  happened  to  the  inartic- 
ulate classes;  and  that  he  had  the  chance  of  doing  a 
perfectly  fresh  thing  in  literature.  He  caught  at  the 
notion,  and  said  he  would  begin  at  once,  and  I  said 
the  sooner  the  better.  He  asked  if  it  would  not  be  well 
to  get  the  narrative  typewritten,  and  I  begged  him 
not  to  wait  for  tliat ;  but  he  said  that  he  knew  a  person 

125 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

who  would  typewrite  it  for  him  without  charge.  I 
could  only  urge  haste,  and  he  went  away  in  a  glow  of 
enterprise.  He  left  with  me  the  address  of  a  twenty- 
five  -  cent  lodging  -  house  in  the  Bowery ;  for  he  ex- 
plained that  he  had  got  money  enough,  by  selling  his 
furniture  on  the  sidewalk,  to  send  his  family  into  the 
country,  and  he  was  living  alone  and  as  cheaply  as  he 
could.  While  at  work  on  his  narrative  he  came  for 
more  relief,  and  then  he  vanished  out  of  my  knowl- 
edge altogether.  I  had  a  leisure  afternoon,  and  went 
down  into  the  Bowery  to  his  lodging-house,  and  found 
that  he  really  lodged  there,  but  he  was  then  out;  and, 
so  far  as  I  am  concerned,  he  is  out  still.  I  am  out 
myself,  in  the  amount  I  advanced  him,  and  which  he 
was  to  repay  me  from  the  money  for  his  eviction  arti- 
cle. He  never  wrote  it,  apparently;  and  perhaps  his 
experiences  of  eviction  lacked  the  vital  elements  of  real- 
ity. I  am  quite  sure  he  was  at  heart  a  romanticist,  for 
he  was  an  Englishman,  and  the  Englishmen  are  all 
romanticists. 

VIII 

I  was  at  one  time  worked  for  a  period  of  years  by 
a  German-born  veteran  of  our  war,  whom  I  was  called 
out  to  see  one  night  from  dinner,  when  I  was  full  of 
good  cheer,  and,  of  course,  quite  helpless  against  a 
case  of  want  like  his.  He  represented  that  he  was  the 
victim  of  an  infirmity  brought  on  by  falling  from  a 
burning  bridge  under  the  rebel  fire,  and  was  liable  to 
be  overtaken  by  it  at  any  moment;  and  he  showed  me 
all  sorts  of  surgeons'  certificates  in  proof  of  the  fact, 
as  well  as  kindly  notes  from  college  professors  and 
clergymen.  I  had,  therefore,  a  double  motive  for  be- 
friending him,  I  had  as  little  wish  that  he  should  be 

126 


TRIBULATIONS    OF   A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

overtaken  by  his  infirmity  in  my  reception-room  as  that 
he  should  go  on  sleeping  in  unfinished  houses  and  base- 
ment  areas;  and  so  I  gave  him  some  money  at  once. 
He  was  to  have  his  pension  money  at  the  end  of  the 
month,  and  till  then  he  said  he  could  live  on  what  I 
gave  him.  I  hurried  him  out  of  the  house  as  fast  as 
I  could,  for  I  did  not  feel  safe  from  his  infirmity 
while  he  was  there.  But  he  kept  coming  back,  and 
always,  in  view  of  his  threatening  infirmity,  got  money 
from  me;  I  am  not  sure  that  I  always  pitied  him  so 
much.  At  last  he  agreed  to*  seek  refuge  in  a  soldiers' 
home,  upon  my  urgence,  and  I  lost  sight  of  him  for 
several  years.  When  he  reappeared,  one  summer  at 
the  seaside,  as  destitute  as  ever,  and  as  threatening  as 
ever  in  regard  to  his  infirmity,  it  seemed  that  he  had 
passed  the  time  in  working  his  way  from  one  soldiers' 
home  to  another,  in  Maine  and  in  New  York,  in  Vir- 
ginia and  in  Ohio,  but  everywhere,  because  of  some 
informality  in  his  papers,  the  gates  were  closed  against 
him.  I  gave  him  a  suit  of  clothes  and  some  more 
money,  and  I  thought  I  had  done  with  him.  at  last, 
for  he  said  that  now,  as  soon  as  he  got  his  next  pension 
money,  he  was  going  home  to  Germany,  to  spend  his 
last  years  with  his  brother, — a  surgeon,  retired  from 
the  German  army, — who  could  take  care  of  him  and 
his  infirmity,  and  they  could  live  cheaply  together, 
upon  their  joint  pensions.  I  applauded  so  wise  a 
plan,  and  we  parted  with  expressions  of  mutual  esteem. 
Two  or  three  months  later,  after  I  had  come  from  the 
sea-side  place  where  he  visited  me,  to  New  York  for 
the  winter,  he  presented  himself  again  to  me.  Heaven 
knows  how  he  had  found  me  out,  but  there  he  was, 
with  his  infirmity,  and  his  story  was  that  now  he  had 
money  enough  to  buy  his  steamer  ticket  to  Hamburg, 

but  that  he  lacked  his  railroad  fare  from  Hamburg  to 

127 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

the  little  'village  where  his  brother  lived.  His  notion 
seemed  to  be  that  I  should  subscribe  with  others  to 
supply  the  amount ;  but  I  had  at  last  a  gleam  of  world- 
ly wisdom.  I  said  I  thought  the  subscription  business 
had  gone  on  long  enough ;  and  he  assented  that  it  had 
at  least  gone  on  a  good  while. 

"  Very  well,  then,"  I  added ;  "  you  go  now  with  the 
money  you  have  for  your  steamer  ticket,  and  buy  it. 
Come  back  here  with  the  ticket,  and  I  will  not  oblige 
you  to  wait  till  you  can  collect  your  railroad  fare  from 
different  people;  I  will  give  you  the  whole  of  it  my- 
self." 

Will  it  be  credited  that  this  sufferer  did  not  come 
back  with  his  steamer  ticket  ?  I  have  never  seen  him 
since,  though  a  few  Weeks  later  I  went  to  call  upon 
him  at  the  ten-cent  hotel  in  the  Bowery  where  he  said 
he  slept.  The  clerk  said  he  was  staying  there,  but  he 
could  not  throw  any  light  upon  his  intention  of  going 
back  to  Germany,  for  he  had  never  heard  him  say  any- 
thing about  it.  He  was  out  at  the  moment,  like  my 
romanticist  Englishman. 

Whilst  I  lived  in  Boston  I  had  a  visit  from  another 
romanticistic  Englishman,  who  professed  to  be  no  other 
than  the  cousin  of  Mr.  Walter  Besant,  though  he  gave 
me  reason  to  think  he  was  mistaken.  It  seems  that  he 
had  arrived  that  very  morning  from  Central  Africa, 
and,  for  all  I  know,  from  the  mystic  presence  of  She 
herself.  In  that  strange  land,  he  wished  me  to  believe, 
he  had  been  a  playwright  and  a  journalist,  but  he 
really  looked  and  spoke  and  smelled  like  a  groom. 
He  dropped  his  aspirates  everywhere,  and,  when  he 
picked  them  up  he  put  them  on  in  the  wrong  places. 
In  his  parlance  I  was  a  bird  of  night,  or  several  such, 
and  I  cannot  rid  myself  now  of  the  belated  conjecture 

that  he  had  possibly  mistaken  me  for  Mr.  'Aggard. 

128 


TRIBULATIONS    OF   A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

He  was  a  cheery  little  creature,  however;  and  when  I 
put  it  to  him,  as  between  man  and  man,  whether  he 
did  not  think  he  was  telling  me  a  rather  improbable 
story,  he  owned  so  sweetly  he  did  that  I  could  not 
help  contributing  to  pay  his  expenses  'ome  to  Heng- 
land.  He  was  not  quite  clear  why  he  should  have 
come  round  by  way  of  Boston,  but  he  said  he  would 
send  me  the  money  back  directly  he  got  'ome. 

He  did  not  do  so,  and  my  experience  is  that  they 
never  do  so.  They  may  forget  it;  they  may  never  be 
able  to  spare  the  money.  E"erer  ?  I  am  wrong.  Only 
last  winter  I  made  my  usual  compromise  with  a  man 
who  asked  ten,  and  lent  him  five;  and  though  he  was 
yet  another  Englishman,  and,  for  anything  I  can  say, 
another  romanticist,  he  returned  my  little  loan  with 
such  a  manly,  honest  letter  that  my  heart  smote  me 
for  not  having  made  it  ten.  I  looked  upon  his  five- 
dollar  bill  as  a  gift  from  heaven,  and  I  made  haste  to 
bestow  it  where  I  am  sure  it  will  never  stand  the  re- 
motest chance  of  getting  back  to  me. 


IX 


I  wish,  sometimes,  that  they  would  not  say  they 
were  going  to  send  the  money  back;  but  I  wish  this 
rather  for  their  sake  than  for  mine.  I  am  pretty  well 
inured  to  the  disappointment  sure  to  follow ;  but  I  am 
afraid  that  the  poor  pretence  demoralizes  them,  and, 
above  all,  I  do  not  wish  to  demoralize  them  by  my 
connivance.  Once,  when  I  was  a  visitor  for  the  Asso- 
ciated Charities  in  Boston,  the  question  came  up  in 
the  weekly  meeting  whether,  if  one  gave  money  when 
there  was  no  hope  of  getting  work,  one  ought  to  let 

the  beneficiary  suppose  that  one  expected  to  get  it 

129 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

back.  Ought  one  to  say  that  he  was  making  his  gift 
a  loan  ?  Would  it  not  be  better  to  treat  it  frankly  as 
a  gift  ?  A  man  to  whose  goodness  I  mentally  uncover 
said  he  had  given  that  point  some  thought,  and  he  be- 
lieved one  ought  not  to  pretend  that  it  was  a  loan 
when  it  was  not;  but  one  might  fitly  say:  "  I  let  you 
have  this  money.  If  you  are  ever  able  to  give  it  back, 
I  shall  be  glad  to  have  you  do  so."  It  seems  to  me 
that  this  is  the  wisest  possible  word  on  the  subject. 

Of  course,  the  reason  why  we  have  such  a  bad  con- 
science in  giving  is  that  we  feel  we  ought  not  to  pau- 
perize people.  Perhaps  this  is  one  reason  why  we  give 
so  little  to  obvious  destitution.  I  am  this  moment 
just  in  from  the  street,  where  I  gave  alms  to  a  one- 
armed  tatterdemalion,  with  something  of  this  obscure 
struggle  in  my  mind.  As  I  came  up  with  him,  well 
fenced  against  the  bitter  wind  that  blew  through  his 
ruins,  I  foresaw  that  I  should  give  him  something, 
and  I  took  from  my  outside  pocket  all  the  change 
there  was  in  it — three  coppers,  a  nickel,  and  a  piece 
of  twenty-five.  I  was  ashamed  to  give  the  coppers, 
and  I  felt  that  a  good  citizen  ought  not  to  give  a  quar- 
ter for  fear  of  pauperizing  a  man  who  had  already 
nothing  in  the  world,  and  no  hopeful  appearance  of 
being  able  to  get  anything.  So  I  gave  him  the  nickel, 
and  I  am  not  quite  easy  in  my  mind  about  it. 

Perhaps  I  was  remotely  influenced  not  to  give  a 
quarter  to  this  one-armed  man  by  the  behavior  of  an- 
other one-armed  man  whom  I  befriended.  I  did  give 
him  a  quarter,  not  from  a  good  impulse,  but  because  I 
had  no  smaller  change,  and  it  was  that  or  nothing. 
The  gift  seemed  to  astound  him.  It  was  in  a  shoe- 
store,  where  I  had  only  one  boot  on,  in  the  process  of 
trying  a  pair,  and  I  was  quite  helpless  against  him 
when  he  burst  into  blessings  of  Irish  picturesqueness, 

130 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

and  asked  my  name,  apparently  that  he  might  pray 
for  me  without  making  a  mistake  in  the  address;  and 
when  I  said,  from  a  natural  bashfulness,  or  a  mean 
fear  that  he  might  find  me  out  at  home  and  come  again 
to  beg  of  me,  that  I  would  take  the  chance  of  the  an- 
swer of  his  prayers  getting  to  me,  he  told  me  all  about 
the  railroad  accident  that  lost  him  his  arm;  and,  not 
content  with  this,  he  took  his  poor  stump — as  if  to 
prove  that  it  was  real — and  rubbed  it  over  me,  and 
blessed  me  and  blessed  me  again,  till  I  was  quite 
ashamed  of  getting  so  much  -more  than  my  money's 
worth.  Shall  I  own  that  I  began  to  fear  this  grateful 
man  was  not  entirely  sober? 


I  dare  say  poverty  and  the  pangs  of  hunger  and 
cold  do  not  foster  habits  of  strict  temperance.  It  is 
a  great  pity  they  do  not,  since  they  are  so  common. 
If  they  did,  they  could  do  more  than  anything  else  to 
advance  the  cause  of  prohibition.  Still,  I  will  not 
say  that  all  the  poor  I  give  to  are  in  liquor  at  the  mo- 
ment, or  that  drunkenness  is  peculiarly  the  vice  of 
one  -  armed  destitution.  Neither  is  gratitude  a  very 
common  or  articulate  emotion  in  my  beneficiaries. 
They  are  mostly,  if  thankful  at  all,  silently  thankful ; 
and  I  find  this  in  better  taste.  I  do  not  believe  that, 
as  a  rule,  they  are  very  imaginative,  or  at  least  so  imr 
aginative  as  romantic  novelists.  Yet  there  was  one 
sufferer  came  up  the  back  elevator  on  a  certain  even- 
ing not  long  ago,  and  bu^st  upon  me  suddenly,  some- 
how as  if  he  had  come  up  through  a  trap  in  the  stage, 
who  seemed  to  have  rather  a  gift  in  that  way.  He 
was  most  amusingly  shabby  and  dirty  (though  I  do 

10  131 


IMPBESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

not  know  why  shabbiness  and  dirt  should  be  amus- 
ing), with  a  cutaway  coat  worn  down  to  its  ultimate 
gloss,  a  frayed  neckcloth,  and  the  very  foulest  collar  I 
can  remember  seeing.  But  he  had  a  brisk  and  pleas- 
ing address,  and  I  must  say  an  excellent  diction.  He 
called  me  by  name,  and  at  once  said  that  friends  whom 
he  had  expected  to  find  in  New  York  were  most  inop- 
portunely in  Europe  at  this  moment  of  his  arrival  from 
a  protracted  sojourn  in  the  West.  But  he  was  very 
anxious  to  get  on  that  night  to  Hartford  and  complete 
his  journey  home  from  Denver,  where  he  had  fallen  a 
prey  to  the  hard  times  in  the  very  hour  of  the  most 
prosperous  speculation;  and  he  proposed,  as  an  in- 
ducement to  a  loan,  borrowing  only  enough  money  to 
take  him  to  New  Haven  by  the  boat — he  would  walk 
the  rest  of  the  way  to  Hartford.  I  no  more  believed 
him  than  I  should  believe  a  ghost  if  it  said  it  was  a 
ghost.  But  I  believed  that  he  was  in  want, — his  clothes 
proved  that, — and  I  gave  him  the  little  sum  he  asked. 
He  said  he  would  send  it  back  the  instant  he  reached 
Hartford;  and  I  am  left  to  think  that  he  has  not  yet 
arrived.  But  I  am  sure  that  even  that  brief  moment 
of  his  airy  and  almost  joyous  companionship  was  worth 
the  money.  He  was  of  an  order  of  classic  impostors 
dear  to  literature,  and  grown  all  too  few  in  these  times 
of  hurry  and  fierce  competition.  I  wish  I  had  seen 
more  of  him,  and  yet  I  cannot  say  that  I  wish  he 
would  come  back;  it  might  be  embarrassing  for  both 
of  us. 

Not  long  before  his  visit  I  had  a  call  from  another 
imaginative  person,  whom  I  was  not  able  to  meet  so 
fully  in  her  views.  This  was  a  middle-aged  lady  who 
said  she  had  come  on  that  morning  from  Boston  to  see 
me.  She  owned  we  had  never  met  before,  and  that 

she  was  quite  unknown  to  me:  but  apparently  she  did 

132 


TABULATIONS    OF  A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

not  think  this  any  bar  to  her  asking  me  for  two  hun- 
dred and  fifty  dollars  to  aid  in  the  education  of  her 
son.  I  confess  that  I  was  bewildered  for  a  moment. 
My  simple  device  of  offering  half  the  amount  demand- 
ed would  have  been  too  costly:  I  really  could  not  have 
afforded  to  give  her  one  hundred  and  twenty-five  dol- 
lars, even  if  she  had  been  willing  to  compromise,  which 
I  was  not  sure  of.  I  am  afraid  the  reader  will  think 
I  shirked.  I  said  that  I  had  a  great  many  demands 
upon  me,  and  I  ended  by  refusing  to  give  anything. 
I  really  do  not  know  how  I  had  the  courage;  perhaps 
it  was  only  frenzy.  She  insisted,  with  reasons  for  my 
giving  which  she  laid  before  me;  but  either  they  did 
not  convince  me  or  I  had  hardened  my  heart  so  well 
that  they  could  not  prevail  with  me,  and  she  got  up 
and  went  away.  As  she  went  out  of  the  room  she 
looked  about  its  appointments,  which  I  had  not  thought 
very  luxurious  before,  and  said  that  she  saw  I  was 
able  to  live  very  comfortably,  at  any  rate;  and  left 
me  to  the  mute  reproach  of  my  carpets  and  easy- 
chairs. 

I  do  not  remember  whether  she  alleged  any  inspira- 
tion in  coming  to  see  me  for  this  good  object;  but  a 
summer  or  two  since  a  lady  came  to  me,  at  my  hotel 
in  the  mountains,  who  said  that  she  had  been  moved 
to  do  so  by  an  impulse  which  seemed  little  short  of 
mystical.  She  said  that  she  was  not  ordinarily  super- 
stitious, but  she  had  wakened  that  morning  in  Boston 
with  my  name  the  first  thing  in  her  thoughts,  and  it 
seemed  so  directly  related  to  what  she  had  in  view 
that  she  could  not  resist  the  suggestion  it  conveyed 
that  she  should  come  at  once  to  lay  her  scheme  before 
me.  She  took  a  good  deal  of  time  to  do  this;  and, 
romantic  as  it  appeared,  I  felt  sure  that  she  was  work- 
ing with  real  material.  It  was  of  a  nature  so  complex, 

133 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

however,  and  on  a  scale  so  vast,  that  I  should  despair 
of  getting  it  intelligibly  before  the  reader,  and  I  will 
not  attempt  it.  I  listened  with  the  greatest  interest; 
but,  at  the  end,  I  was  obliged  to  say  that  I  thought  her 
mystical  impulse  was  mistaken;  I  was  sorry  it  had 
deceived  her;  I  was  quite  certain  that  I  had  not  the 
means  or  the  tastes  to  enter  upon  the  aesthetic  enter- 
prise which  she  proposed.  In  return,  I  suggested  a 
number  of  millionaires  whose  notorious  softness  of 
heart,  or  whose  wish  to  get  themselves  before  the  pub- 
lic by  their  good  deeds,  ought  to  make  them  more 
available,  and  we  parted  the  best  of  friends.  I  am  not 
yet  quite  able  to  make  up  my  mind  that  she  was  not 
the  victim  of  a  hypnotic  suggestion  from  the  unseen 
world,  and  altogether  innocent  in  her  appeal  to  me. 


XI 


In  fact,  I  am  not  able  to  think  very  ill  even  of  im- 
postors. It  is  a  great  pity  for  them,  and  even  a  great 
shame,  to  go  about  deceiving  people  of  means;  but  I 
do  not  believe  they  are  so  numerous  as  people  of  means 
imagine.  As  a  rule,  I  do  not  suppose  they  succeed 
for  long,  and  their  lives  must  be  full  of  cares  and 
anxieties,  which,  of  course,  one  must  not  sympathize 
with,  but  which  are  real  enough,  nevertheless.  People 
of  means  would  do  well  to  consider  this,  and  at  least 
not  plume  themselves  very  much  upon  not  being  cheat- 
ed. If  they  have  means,  it  is  perhaps  part  of  the 
curse  of  money,  or  of  that  unfriendliness  to  riches 
which  our  religion  is  full  of,  that  money  should  be 
got  from  them  by  unworthy  persons.  They  have  their 
little  romantic  superstitions,  too.  One  of  these  is  the 

belief  that  beggars  are  generally  persons  who  will  not 

134 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A   CHEERFUL    GIVER 

work,  and  that  they  are  often  persons  of  secret  wealth, 
which  they  constantly  increase  by  preying  upon  the 
public.  I  take  leave  to  doubt  this  altogether.  Beggary 
appears  to  me  in  its  conditions  almost  harder  than  any 
other  trade ;  and,  from  what  I  have  seen  of  the  amount 
it  earns,  the  return  it  makes  is  smaller  than  any  other. 
I  should  not  myself  feel  safe  in  refusing  anything  to 
a  beggar  upon  the  theory  of  a  fortune  sewn  into  a 
mattress,  to  be  discovered  after  the  beggar  has  died 
intestate.  I  know  that  a  great  many  good  people  pin 
their  faith  to  such  mattresses;  but  I  should  be  greatly 
surprised  if  one  such  could  be  discovered  in  the  whole 
city  of  New  York. 

On  the  other  hand,  I  feel  pretty  sure  that  there  are 
hundreds  and  even  thousands  of  people  who  are  in- 
sufficiently fed  and  clad  in  New  York;  and  if  here 
and  there  one  of  these  has  the  courage  of  his  misery 
and  asks  alms,  one  must  not  be  too  cock-sure  it  is  a 
sin  to  give  to  him. 

Of  course,  one  must  not  pauperize  him:  that  ought 
by  all  means  to  be  avoided;  I  am  always  agreeing  to 
that.  But  if  he  is  already  pauperized ;  if  we  know  by 
statistics  and  personal  knowledge  that  there  are  hun- 
dreds and  even  thousands  of  people  who  cannot  get 
work,  and  that  they  must  suffer  if  they  do  not  beg,  let 
us  not  be  too  hard  upon  them.  Let  us  refuse  them 
kindly,  and  try  not  to  see  them;  for  if  we  see  their 
misery  and  do  not  give,  that  demoralizes  us.  Come, 
I  say ;  have  not  we  some  rights,  too  ?  No  man  strikes 
another  man  a  blow  without  becoming  in  sort  and 
measure  a  devil;  and  to  see  what  looks  like  want,  and 
to  deny  its  prayer,  has  an  effect  upon  the  heart  which 
is  not  less  depraving.  Perhaps  it  would  be  a  fair 
division  of  the  work  if  we  let  the  deserving  rich  give 

only  to  the  deserving  poor,  and  kept  the  undeserving 

135 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

poor  for  ourselves,  who,  if  we  are  not  rich,  are  not 
deserving,  either. 

XII 

I  should  be  sorry  if  anything  I  have  said  seemed 
to  cast  slight  upon  the  organized  efforts  at  relieving 
want,  especially  such  as  unite  inquiry  into  the  facts 
and  the  provision  of  work  with  the  relief  of  want.  All 
that  I  contend  for  is  the  right — or  call  it  the  privilege 
— of  giving  to  him  that  asketh,  even  when  you  do  not 
know  that  he  needs,  or  deserves  to  need.  Both  here 
and  in  Boston  I  have  lent  myself  —  sparingly  and 
grudgingly,  I'll  own — to  those  organized  efforts;  and 
I  know  how  sincere  and  generous  they  are,  how  effect- 
ive they  often  are,  how  ineffective.  They  used  to  let 
me  go  mostly  to  the  Italian  folk  who  applied  for  aid 
in  Boston,  because  I  could  more  or  less  meet  them  in 
their  own  language;  but  once  they  gave  me  a  Russian 
to  manage — I  think  because  I  was  known  to  have  a 
devotion  for  Tolstoy  and  for  the  other  Russian  novel- 
ists. The  Russian  in  question  was  not  a  novelist,  but 
a  washer  of  bags  in  a  sugar-refinery;  and  at  the  time 
I  went  to  make  my  first  call  upon  him  he  had  been 
"  laid  off,"  as  the  euphemism  is,  for  two  months — that 
is,  he  had  been  without  work,  and  had  been  wholly 
dependent  upon  the  allowance  the  charities  made  him. 
He  had  a  wife  and  a  complement  of  children — I  do 
not  know  just  how  many;  but  they  all  seemed  to  live 
in  one  attic  room  in  the  North  End.  I  acquainted 
myself  fully  with  the  case  and  went  about  looking  for 
work  in  his  behalf.  In  this,  I  think,  I  found  my  only 
use :  but  it  was  use  to  me  only,  for  the  people  of  whom 
I  asked  work  for  him  treated  me  with  much  the 
same  ignominy  as  if  I  had  been  seeking  it  for  myself; 

136 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

and  it  was  well  that  I  should  learn  just  what  the  exas- 
perated mind  of  a  fellow-being  is  when  he  is  asked 
for  work  and  has  none  to  give.  He  regards  the  ap- 
plicant as  an  oppressor,  or,  at  least,  an  aggressor,  and 
he  is  eager  to  get  rid  of  him  by  bluntness,  by  coldness, 
even  by  rudeness.  After  the  unavailing  activity  of  a 
week  or  two,  I  myself  began  to  resent  the  Eussian's 
desire  for  work,  and  I  visited  him  at  longer  and  longer 
intervals  to  find  whether  he  had  got  anything  to  do, 
for  he  was  looking  after  work,  too.  At  last  I  let  a 
month  go  by,  and,  when  I  came,  he  met  me  at  the  street 
door — or,  say,  alley  door — of  the  tenement-house  with 
a  smiling  face.  He  was  always  smiling,  poor  fellow, 
but  now  he  smiled  joyously.  He  had  got  a  job — they 
always  call  it  a  job,  and  the  Italians  pronounce  it  a 
giobbe.  His  job  was  one  which  testified  to  the  hete- 
rogeneous character  of  American  civilization  in  even 
amusing  measure.  The  Jews  had  come  into  a  neigh- 
boring street  so  thickly  that  they  had  crowded  every 
one  else  out ;  they  had  bought  the  Congregational  meet- 
ing-house, which  they  were  turning  into  a  synagogue, 
and  they  had  given  this  orthodox  Russian  the  job  of 
knocking  the  nails  out  of  the  old  woodwork.  His  only 
complaint  was  that  the  Jews  would  not  let  him  work 
on  Saturday,  and  the  Christians  would  not  let  him 
work  on  Sunday,  and  so  he  could  earn  but  five  dollars  a 
week.  He  did  not  blame  me  for  my  long  failure  to 
help  him;  on  the  contrary,  so  far  as  I  could  make  out 
from  the  limited  vocabulary  we  enjoyed  in  common, 
he  was  grateful.  But  I  have  no  doubt  he  was  glad  to 
be  rid  of  me ;  and  heaven  knows  how  glad  I  was  to  be 
rid  of  him. 

I  do  not  believe  I  ever  found  work  for  any  one, 
though  I  tried  diligently  and,  I  think,  not  unwisely. 

Perhaps  the  best  effect  from  my  efforts  was  that  they 

137 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

inspired  the  poor  creatures  to  efforts  of  their  own, 
which  were  sometimes  successful.  I  had  on  my  hands 
and  heart  for  nearly  a  whole  winter  the  most  meritori- 
ous Italian  family  I  ever  knew,  without  being  able  to 
do  anything  but  sympathize  and  offer  secret  alms  in 
little  gifts  to  the  children.  Once  I  got  one  of  the 
boys  a  place  in  a  book-store,  but  the  law  would  not 
allow  him  to  take  it  because  he  was  not  past  the  age 
of  compulsory  schooling.  The  father  had  a  peripatetic 
fruit-stand,  which  he  pushed  about  on  a  cart;  and  his 
great  aim  was  to  get  the  privilege  of  stationing  him- 
self at  one  of  the  railroad  depots.  I  found  that  there 
were  stations  which  were  considered  particularly  desir- 
able by  the  fruiterers,  and  that  the  chief  of  these  was 
in  front  of  the  old  United  States  court-house.  A  fruit- 
erer out  of  place,  whose  family  I  visited  for  the  char- 
ities, tried  even  to  corrupt  me,  and  promised  me 
that  if  I  would  get  him  this  stendio  (they  Italianize 
"  stand  "  to  that  effect,  just  as  they  translate  "  bar  " 
into  barra,  and  so  on)  he  would  give  me  something 
outright.  ff E  poi,  ci  sara  sempre  la  mancia"  ("And 
then  there  will  always  be  the  drink-money").  I  lost 
an  occasion  to  lecture  him  upon  the  duties  of  the  citi- 
zen; but  I  am  not  a  ready  speaker. 

The  sole  success  —  but  it  was  very  signal  —  of  my 
winter's  work  was  getting  a  young  Italian  into  the  hos- 
pital. He  had  got  a  rheumatic  trouble  of  the  heart 
from  keeping  a  stendio  in  a  cellarway,  and,  when  I  saw 
him  I  thought  it  would  be  little  use  to  get  him  into 
the  hospital.  The  young  doctor  who  had  charge  of 
him,  and  whom  I  looked  up,  was  of  the  same  mind. 
But  I  could  not  help  trying  for  him;  and,  when  the 
sisters  at  the  hospital  (where  he  got  well,  in  spite  of 
all)  said  he  could  be  received,  I  made  favor  for  an 

ambulance  to  carry  him  to  it.    It  was  a  beautiful  white 

138 


TRIBULATIONS    OF  A    CHEERFUL    GIVER 

spring  day  when  I  went  to  tell  him  the  hour  the  am- 
bulance would  call;  the  sky  was  blue  overhead,  the 
canaries  sang  in  their  cages  along  the  street.  I  left 
all  this  behind  when  I  entered  the  dark,  chill  tenement- 
house,  where  that  dreadful  poverty-smell  struck  the  life 
out  of  the  spring  in  my  soul  at  the  first  breath.  The 
sick  man's  apartment  was  clean  and  sweet,  through  his 
mother's  care  (this  poor  woman  was  as  wholly  a  lady  as 
any  I  have  seen)  ;  but,  when  I  passed  into  his  room, 
he  clutched  himself  up  from  the  bed  and  stretched 
his  arms  toward  me  with  gasps  of  "  Lo  spedale!  lo 
spedale  !"  The  spring,  the  coming  glory  of  this  world, 
was  nothing  to  him.  It  was  the  hospital  he  wanted; 
and  to  the  poor,  to  the  incurable  disease  of  our  con- 
ditions, the  hospital  is  the  best  we  have  to  give.  To  be 
sure,  there  is  also  the  grave. 


THE   CLOSING   OF   THE   HOTEL 

IT  scarcely  began  before  the  last  of  August,  when 
the  guests  ebbed  away  by  floods,  in  every  train.  The 
end  of  the  season  was  purely  conventional.  One  day 
the  almanac  said  it  was  August,  and  the  hotel  was  full ; 
another  day  the  almanac  said  it  was  September,  and 
the  vast  caravansary  was  instantly  touched  with  deple- 
tion, and  within  a  week  it  hung  loose  upon  its  inmates 
like  the  raiment  upon  the  frame  of  a  man  who  has 
been  banting.  There  was  no  change  in  the  weather; 
that  remained  as  summer-like  as  ever,  and  grew  more 
and  more  divinely  beautiful.  The  conditions  continued 
the  same,  only  more  agreeable;  the  service  was  still 
abundant  and  perfect;  the  table  was  of  an  unimpaired 
variety;  there  was  no  such  sudden  revival  of  business 
or  pleasure  in  the  city  that  people  should  abandon  the 
leisure  of  the  sea-shore;  the  ocean  smiled  as  serenely, 
the  breakers  crashed  as  lyrically  along  the  beach;  the 
country,  for  those  who  were  to  prolong  their  outing, 
would  be  dry  and  dusty.  But  a  certain  fiction  of  the 
calendar  had  reported  itself  in  the  human  conscious- 
ness ;  and,  as  men  are  the  prey  of  superstition  and  emo- 
tion, the  population  of  the  huge  hostelry  yielded  by  a 
single  impulse  to  the  pressure  of  the  pretence  that  it 
was  September. 


Huge,  I  have  called  the  hostelry,  and  I  do  not  know 
that  I  can  add  to  the  effect  of  size  which  I  wish  to 

140 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

impart  by  saying  that  it  is  of  a  veritably  American 
immensity.  It  stretches  along  the  sea  like  the  shore 
of  a  continent;  and,  when  I  walked  from  one  end  of 
its  seaward  veranda  to  the  other,  I  felt  as  if  I  were 
going  from  Castine  in  Maine  to  St.  Augustine  in  Flor- 
ida. Eeally,  it  is  only  the  fifth  of  a  mile  in  length, 
but  I  have  ordinarily  lived  in  houses  so  much  shorter 
that  my  fancy  takes  wing  when  I  think  of  it,  and  will 
not  brook  a  briefer  flight.  In  like  manner,  when  I 
speak  of  its  thousand  dwellers  as  a  population,  I  am 
perhaps  giving  way  to  an  effect  of  habitually  sharing 
my  roof  with  four  or  five  persons. 

They  were  nearly  a  thousand  when  I  came,  but  the 
place  was  so  spacious  that  I  had  large  areas  of  the 
piazza  to  myself  whenever  I  liked,  and  I  was  often  a 
solitary  wayfarer  up  and  down  the  halls  that  projected 
themselves  in  dimmer  and  dimmer  perspective  between 
the  suites  of  rooms  on  the  right  hand  and  on  the  left.  It 
was  the  dining-room,  with  its  forest  of  pine  posts,  its 
labyrinth  of  tables,  its  army  of  black  waiters,  and  its 
only  a  little  larger  army  of  guests,  which  gave  that 
impression  of  a  dense  overpeopling,  such  as  one  could 
not  feel  in  greater  degree  even  in  the  tenement  quar- 
ters of  the  East  Side.  This  was  peculiarly  the  case 
on  a  Sunday,  when  the  guests  had  guests;  and  in  the 
tramp  of  the  black  forces,  the  clash  of  crockery,  and 
the  harsh  jangle  of  the  cutlery,  mingled  with  the  dull, 
subdued  sound  of  the  guttling  and  guzzling,  there  was 
something  like  the  noise  of  a  legion  stirring  in  its  har- 
ness and  hailing  Caesar  with  the  war-like  devotion  in- 
spired by  a  munificent  donative. 

In  the  early  morning  there  was  a  hardly  less  power- 
ful impression  of  numbers,  when  the  crying  children, 
the  half -hushed  quarrelling  of  some  husbands  and 
wives,  and  the  loud  and  loving  adieux  of  others  part- 
Hi 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

ing  for  the  day,  burst  the  frail  partitions  of  their  rooms 
and  mixed  in  the  corridors  with  the  rush  of  the  porters' 
trunk  -  bearing  trucks,  pushed  over  the  long  carpeted 
stretches  with  the  voluble  clatter  of  so  many  lawn- 
mowers,  the  flight  of  the  call  -  boys'  feet,  the  fierce 
clangor  of  the  chambermaids'  bells,  and  the  strongly 
brogued  controversies  and  gossip  of  the  chambermaids 
themselves.  No  doubt  all  these  effects  were  exaggerated 
by  the  senses  just  unfolding  themselves  in  the  waking 
consciousness,  and  taking  angry  note  of  the  disturbing 
influences  without.  But  the  multitude  sheltered  by  a 
single  roof  was  nevertheless  very  great:  at  the  height 
of  the  season,  the  guests  and  the  servants,  the  drones 
and  the  workers,  were  some  fifteen  hundred  together. 

II 

All  at  once,  as  I  say,  a  great  part  of  the  multitude 
vanished.  All  at  once,  on  the  verandas,  and  in  the 
wide  office  swept  with  yet  cooler  currents  from  the 
sweet-breathed  sea,  I  was  sensible  of  a  sudden  deci- 
mation. I  cannot  fix  the  date  with  precision,  but  one 
night  at  about  half-past  eight  the  great  moony  electrics 
which  swung  in  space  high  over  the  floors  of  the  office, 
the  ball-room,  and  the  dining-room  paled  their  effect- 
ual fires,  which  they  never  afterward  relumed,  and  left 
us  to  the  bat-like  waverings  of  the  naphtha  gas.  I  re- 
member the  sinking  of  the  heart  with  which  my  senses 
took  cognizance  of  the  fact.  No  one  spoke  or  audibly 
noted  it ;  the  talking  groups  talked  on  in  fallen  tones ; 
the  people  who  were  reading  books  or  papers  drew 
them  a  little  nearer,  or  put  them  a  little  farther ;  those 
who  were  writing  letters  at  the  long  tables  in  the  read- 
ing-room silently  adjusted  their  vision  to  the  obscurity. 
It  was  like  the  effect  of  some  august  natural  catas- 

142 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

trophe;  the  general  disposition  was  to  ignore  the  fact, 
as  we  shall  perhaps  try  to  ignore  the  fact  that  the  world 
has  began  to  burn  up  when  it  begins  to  burn,  and  pre- 
tend that  it  is  merely  a  fire  over  in  Iloboken  or  Long 
Island  City  that  the  department  will  soon  have  under 
control. 

It  may  have  been  the  morning  of  that  day  or  the 
morning  of  the  next,  but  it  was  at  least  some  neigh- 
boring morning  that  I  sauntered  down  to  one  of  the 
forenoon  trains  and  saw  a  large  detachment  of  our 
colored  troops  departing.  They  were  very  gay,  as  they 
nearly  always  are,  poor  fellows ;  and  they  were  exchang- 
ing humorous  and  derisive  adieux  with  a  detachment 
of  those  who  were  to  remain,  and  who  pretended  on 
their  part  to  mock  their  departing  comrades.  These 
helped  them  off  with  their  baggage,  wheeling  the  heavy 
truck-loads  of  the  trunks  which  the  porters  left  to  them ; 
and,  when  all  was  ready,  shaking  hands  again  and. 
again,  and  telling  them  to  be  good  to  themselves.  At 
the  last  moment  a  very  short,  stout,  little  black  man 
appeared  with  a  truck  heaped  high  with  baggage,  and 
rushed  it  down  the  long  esplanade  to  the  platform  be- 
side the  train,  amid  the  wild  cheers  and  wagers  of  the 
going  and  staying  spectators.  He  had  all  the  cry  till 
the  train  actually  started,  when  a  young  colored  brother 
burst  out  of  the  front  door  of  a  car  from  which  it  had 
detached  itself  and  began  to  run  it  down  with  a  heavy 
grip-sack  flying  wildly  about  and  beating  his  legs  and 
flanks.  He  had  taken  his  place  in  this  car  unaware 
of  its  fate,  and  had  remained  in  it,  exulting  from  the 
open  window  in  his  sole  possession ;  and  now  the  secret 
of  his  proprietorship  had  been  revealed  to  his  dismay. 
But  it  was  a  very  kindly  train;  when  his  pursuit 
became  known,  the  locomotive  obligingly  slowed  to  a 
stand,  and  he  was  pulled  aboard  the  rear  platform 

143 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

amid  a  jubilation  which  few  real  advantages  inspire 
in  this  world. 

Ill 

An  indefinable  gloom  settled  upon  me  as  the  train 
curved  out  into  the  marsh,  and  the  laughing,  chatter- 
ing, cheering,  hat-waving  remnant  came  back  to  the 
hotel  and  dispersed  about  their  work.  There  were 
still  a  great  many  of  them,  and  there  were  still  a  great 
many  of  us,  but  I  felt  that  the  end  had  begun.  I  do 
not  know  whether  I  felt  this  fact  more  keenly  or  not 
when  the  dentist,  whose  presence  I  had  been  tacitly 
proud  of  all  through  August,  abandoned  the  house 
which  he  had  helped  to  render  metropolitan.  But  I  am 
sure  that  it  was  a  definite  shock  to  lose  him;  and  that 
the  tooth  which  his  presence  had  held  in  abeyance  as- 
serted itself  in  a  wild  throe  at  his  going.  Once  as  I 
passed  the  door  of  his  office  his  name  was  on  it  and 
his  hours ;  when  I  returned  fifteen  minutes  later  to  ask 
an  appointment  with  him  his  name  was  gone,  and  the 
useless  hours  alone  remained.  On  his  way  to  take 
passage  in  his  cat-boat  for  the  farthermost  parts  of  the 
Great  South  Bay,  he  kindly  stopped  and  advised  about 
the  grumbling  tooth.  Then  he  passed  out  of  the  hotel, 
and  left  it  to  ache  if  it  must,  with  an  unrequited  long- 
ing for  the  filling  fatally  delayed. 

The  doctor  went  a  week  later,  but  before  this  other 
changes  had  taken  place,  among  which  the  most  cata- 
clysmal  was  the  passing  of  the  band,  which  vanished, 
as  it  were,  in  a  sudden  crash  of  silence.  The  whole 
month  long  I  had  heard  it  playing  in  the  afternoon 
midway  of  the  long  veranda,  and  in  the  evening  on 
its  platform  in  the  ballroom,  and  with  my  imperfect 

knowledge  of  music  had  waited  each  day  and  night 

144 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

till  it  came  to  that  dissolute,  melancholy  melody  to 
which  the  Eastern  girls  danced  their  wicked  dance  at 
the  World's  Fair;  not  because  I  like  dissolute  and 
melancholy  things,  but  because  I  was  then  able  to 
make  sure  what  tune  the  band  was  playing.  I  had  in 
this  way  become  used  to  the  band,  and  I  missed  it 
poignantly,  if  one  can  miss  a  thing  poignantly;  which. 
I  doubt.  Other  people  seemed  to  enjoy  it,  and  I  like 
to  see  people  enjoying  themselves.  Besides,  its  going 
brought  the  dancing  to  a  close,  which  I  enjoyed  my- 
self. 

I  mean  that  I  enjoyed  looking  at  the  dancing.  This 
was  for  the  most  part,  even  at  the  height  of  our  gay- 
ety,  performed  by  boys  and  girls,  and  very  young  chil- 
dren, whom  I  saw  led  away  to  bed  heart-broken  at  nine 
o'clock.  One  small  couple  of  these  I  loved  very  much. 
I  fancied  them  a  little  brother  and  sister,  and  I  delight- 
ed in  their  courage  and  perseverance  in  taking  the 
floor  for  every  dance,  and  through  all  changes  of  tune 
and  figure  turning  solemly  round  and  round  with 
their  arms  about  each  other's  waists.  One  night  there 
came  a  bad,  bad  boy,  who  posted  himself  in  front  of 
them  and  plagued  them,  jumping  up  and  down  before 
them  and  hindering  their  serious  gyration.  Another 
evening  the  little  brother  was  cross  and  would  not 
dance,  and  the  little  sister  had  to  pull  him  out  on  the 
floor  and  make  him. 

Sometimes,  however,  there  were  even  grown  people 
on  the  floor.  Then  I  chose  a  very  pretty  young  couple, 
whom  I  called  my  couple,  and  shared  their  joy  in  the 
waltz  without  their  knowing  it.  We  were  by  all  odds 
the  best  dancers  and  the  best  looking.  We  stayed  long 
enough  to  poison  the  others  with  jealousy,  but  we  al- 
ways went  away  rather  early.  When  the  band  left,  all 
this  innocent  pleasure  ended.  There  was  one  delirious 

145 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

evening,  indeed,  when  the  floor-manager,  in  default  of 
other  music,  whistled  a  waltz,  and  the  young  ladies,  in 
default  of  young  men,  trod  a  mad  measure  with  one  an- 
other to  his  sibilation.  But  this  was  a  dying  burst  of 
gayety :  it  did  not  and  could  not  happen  again. 


IV 


I  have  to  accuse  myself  of  giving  no  just  idea  of 
the  constant  flowing  and  dribbling  away  of  the  guests, 
who  never  ceased  departing.  The  trains  that  bore  them 
and  their  baggage  brought  no  others  to  replace  them, 
and  the  house  gradually  emptied  itself  until  not  more 
than  a  poor  three  hundred  remained.  With  each  de- 
fection of  a  considerable  number  of  guests  there  fol- 
lowed a  reduction  of  the  helping  force,  who  now  no 
longer  departed  laughing,  but  with  a  touch  of  that 
loneliness  falling  upon  us  all.  It  must  be  understood 
that  we  were  all  staying  on  in  our  closing  hotel  by 
sufferance.  It  closed  officially  on  the  10th,  but  the 
landlord  was  to  remain,  and  such  guests  as  wished 
might  remain,  too.  This  made  us  eager  to  linger  till 
the  very  last  moment  we  were  allowed. 

Ever  since  the  elevator  had  ceased  to  run,  there  had 
been  a  sense  of  doom  in  the  air.  One  day  we  noted 
a  fine  reluctance  in  the  elevator ;  when  people  crowded 
it  full,  it  would  not  go  up.  Then  it  began  to  waver 
under  a  few;  it  made  false  starts  and  stops.  A  placard 
presently  said,  "  Elevator  not  running."  Then  this 
was  removed,  and  the  elevator  ran  again  for  a  day  or 
two.  At  last  it  ceased  to  run  so  finally  that  no  placard 
was  needed.  The  elevator-boys  went  away;  it  was  as 
if  the  elevator  were  extinct. 

I  think  it  was  on  the  same  day  that  the  hall  clock 
146 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

stopped.  The  clock  was  started  again  by  the  head- 
porter,  but  after  that  the  hotel  ran  on  borrowed  time. 
Once  it  borrowed  the  time  of  me,  whose  watch  has 
not  once  been  right  in  thirty-three  years,  a  whole  gen- 
eration ! 

The  temperature  of  the  water  ceased  to  be  reported 
even  before  the  end  of  August;  the  hours  of  high  and 
low  tide  were  no  longer  given.  Twice  when  the  re- 
porters came  down  to  see  the  yacht-race  off  our  beach 
the  bulletin-board  was  covered  with  yellow  telegrams 
from  the  coast  where  it  was  'really  seen,  boasting  the 
victory  and  triumphant  defeat  of  the  Defender.  This 
quickened  our  pulses  for  the  moment;  and  one  night 
the  ladies  all  put  on  their  best  dresses  and  assembled 
for  a  progressive  euchre-party  in  the  vast  acreage  of 
the  parlor.  It  was  a  heroic  but  perhaps  desperate  act 
of  gayety. 


One  of  the  most  striking  natural  phenomena  of  the 
hotel  closing  was  the  arrival  of  the  gulls  on  our  beach, 
or  rather  on  the  waters  beyond  the  beach.  I  had  won- 
dered at  their  absence  all  August  long,  but  punctually 
on  the  first  day  of  September  they  came.  The  weather 
had  not  changed  for  them  any  more  than  it  had  for 
the  guests  who  fled  the  place  at  the  same  date,  but 
perhaps  the  wild  wheeling  and  screaming  things  had  a 
prescience  of  the  autumnal  storms,  and  came  with  pro- 
phetic welcome  in  their  wings. 

Otherwise  the  premonitions  of  change  were  within 
the  hotel  itself,  and  they  were  more  impressive  when- 
ever they  assumed  an  official  character.  It  was  with 
a  real  emotion  that  one  day  I  missed  one  of  the  clerks 

ii  147 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

out  of  the  number  within  the  office.  He  was  there, 
and  then  he  was  not  there;  it  was  as  if  he  had  been 
lost  overboard  during  his  watch.  I  had  scarcely  re- 
covered from  his  loss  when  another  clerk,  upon  whose 
distribution  of  the  mail  we  all  used  to  hang  impatient 
for  the  equal  disappointment  of  letters  or  no  letters, 
ceased  from  his  ministrations  as  if  he  had  all  along 
been  a  wraith  of  mist  and  had  simply  melted  away. 
The  room  clerk,  who  was  a  more  definite  personality 
to  us,  went  next,  with  a  less  supernatural  effect;  he 
even  said  he  might  come  back,  but  he  did  not  come 
back,  and  the  office  force  was  reduced  to  the  cashier 
and  a  young  clerk  not  perceptible  earlier  in  the  sea- 
son. 

At  all  great  hotels  the  landlord  is  usually  a  remote 
and  problematical  personage,  and  so  it  was  with  ours 
until  the  office  force  began  to  thin  away  around  him. 
Then  he  became  more  and  more  visible,  tangible,  con- 
versable, and  proved  a  distinctly  agreeable  addition  to 
our  circle,  in  which  the  note  of  an  increasing  domes- 
ticity was  struck.  I  do  not  know  of  anything  that 
gave  so  keen  a  sense  of  our  resolution  into  a  single 
family,  still  large,  but  insensibly  drawn  together  by 
the  need  of  a  mutual  comfort  and  encouragement,  as 
the  invasion  of  the  hotel  by  a  multitude  of  crickets. 
Whether  it  was  the  departure  of  the  human  host  which 
tempted  the  crickets  in-doors,  or  whether  it  was  some 
such  instinct  as  brought  the  gulls  to  our  seas,  they 
were  all  at  once  all  over  the  place,  piercing  its  deepen- 
ing silence  with  their  harsh  stridulation.  In  the  cham- 
bers they  carked  so  loud  and  clear  that  one  could 
hardly  sleep  for  them,  and  in  the  glooming  reaches 
and  expanses  of  the  corridors,  parlors,  halls,  and  din- 
ing-room they  shrilled  in  incessant  chorus. 

148 


THE  CLOSING  OF  THE  HOTEL 


VI 


After  the  first  moment,  when  the  association  with 
the  home  hearth  and  the  simple  fireside  evenings  of 
other  days  had  spent  itself,  the  crickets  were  rather 
awful,  and  personally  I  would  rather  have  had  the 
band  back.  But  their  weird  music  prompted  a  closer 
union  of  the  guests,  and  our  chairs  were  closer  together 
on  the  veranda  and  in  the  office.  We  found  that  we 
were  very  charming  and  interesting  people,  and  I  be- 
gan to  wonder  if  I  had  not  lost  more  than  I  could  ever 
make  good  by  not  seeking  the  acquaintance  of  the  seven 
hundred  others  who  were  gone.  From  day  to  day,  from 
night  to  night,  our  numbers  were  lessened,  but  we 
never  spoke  of  the  departures;  we  instinctively  recog- 
nized that  it  would  have  been  bad  form;  we  were  like 
the  garrison  of  a  beleaguered  city,  that  lost  a  few  men 
by  famine  or  foray  from  time  to  time,  but  kept  up 
a  heroic  pretence  that  they  were  as  many  as  ever.  Or, 
we  were  like  a  shipwrecked  crew  clinging  to  a  water- 
logged vessel,  and  caught  from  it  now  and  then  by  a 
hungry  shark  or  a  hungry  wave,  or  dropping  away  into 
the  gulf  from  mere  exhaustion. 

These  figures  are  rather  violent,  and  present  only  a 
subjective  effect  in  the  more  sensitive  spirits.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  we  lived  luxuriously  all  the  time.  The 
time  came  when  we  heard  that  on  a  certain  day  the 
chef  was  going,  but  we  should  not  have  known  he  was 
gone  by  any  difference  in  the  table.  It  grew  rather 
more  attractive ;  if  there  were  fewer  dishes,  they  were 
better  cooked;  one  could  fancy  a  touch  of  personal  at- 
tention in  them  which  one  could  not  have  fancied  when 
we  were  seven  hundred  and  fifty  at  table  and  the  help 
who  served  us  were  three  hundred  and  fifty. 

149 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 


VII 

The  help  had  gradually  dwindled  away  till  there 
were  not  more  than  fifty.  I  had  kept  my  waiter 
through  all;  he  was  a  quiet  elderly  man  of  formed 
habits,  whom  I  associated  with  the  idea  of  permanency 
in  every  way,  so  that  I  could  scarcely  believe  that  we 
were  to  be  parted.  But  one  morning  he  was  seized 
by  the  curious  foreboding  of  departure  which  seemed 
really  one  of  its  symptoms  among  his  tribe,  and  he 
said  he  did  not  know  but  he  should  be  going  soon.  I 
said,  Oh,  I  hoped  not;  and  he  answered  bravely  that 
he  hoped  not,  too,  but  he  shook  his  head,  and  we  both 
felt  that  it  was  best  to  let  a  final  half-dollar  pass  be- 
tween us  in  expression  of  a  provisional  farewell. 

That  was  indeed  the  last  of  him,  and  that  day  when 
I  came  in  to  lunch  I  found  that  I  was  appointed  an- 
other table,  in  another  place,  with  another  waiter  to 
take  my  order.  It  was  a  little  shock,  but  I  was  not 
unprepared.  I  had  noted  the  gradual  dismantling  of 
the  tables  until  now  they  stretched  long  rows  of  bar- 
ren surfaces  down  the  tenth  of  a  mile  which  the  din- 
ing-room covered,  and  showed  their  reverberated  laby- 
rinth in  the  mirrors  of  the  vast  sideboards  at  either 
end  of  the  hall.  The  remaining  guests  were  snugly 
grouped  on  the  seaward  side  of  the  room,  where  our 
tables  commanded  the  marine  views  that  I  had  long 
vainly  envied  others. 

But  after  the  first  transition  I  was  changed  to  an- 
other table  with  another  waiter — a  tall  student  from 
Yale,  who  joined  to  a  scholarly  absence  of  mind  con- 
cerning my  wants  an  appreciation  of  my  style  of  jokes 
that  went  far  to  console  me,  though  I  was  not  sure 
that  it  was  quite  decorous  for  him  to  laugh  at  them 

150 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

when  they  were  addressed  to  others.  I  tried  to  grapple 
him  to  me  with  early  and  frequent  donatives,  and  he 
would  have  been  willing  enough  to  stay;  but  the  guests 
kept  going  and  the  helpers  were  cut  off,  one  by  one,  till 
the  hour  came  when  we  both  felt — 

"  The  first  slight  swerving  of  the  heart 
That  words  are  powerless  to  express, 
And  leave  it  still  unsaid  in  part, 
Or  say  it  in  too  great  excess." 

The  next  morning  he  told  me"  he  was  going;  and,  as  I 
sauntered  down  to  take  the  train  for  a  brief  flight  to 
New  York,  I  saw  him  on  the  platform  in  citizen's  dress 
and  smoking  a  cigarette.  He  was  laughing  and  joking 
with  some  of  the  waiters  who  still  lingered,  and  bid- 
ding them  take  care  of  themselves,  and  promising  a 
like  vigilance  of  his  own  welfare. 

After  that  there  was  the  short  interval  of  a  single 
meal  when  I  was  served  by  a  detached  waiter,  before 
I  was  handed  over  to  the  kindly  helper  who  next  had 
charge  of  me.  I  clung  to  him  anxiously,  for  I  did  not 
know  what  day  or  hour  I  should  lose  him;  I  did  not 
know  how  soon  he  might  lose  me. 

In  the  passing  of  the  head-porter  there  was  some- 
thing deeply  dramatic,  almost  tragic  for  me.  We  had 
become  acquaintances,  friends,  even,  I  hope,  and  I  had 
become  sensible  of  the  gradual  disappearance  of  his 
subordinates  until  they  were  reduced  to  what  I  may  call 
the  tail-porter  in  contradistinction  to  the  head-porter. 
Then  the  head-porter  said  that  he  had  a  great  mind  to 
be  going  himself ;  but,  when  I  asked  him  why,  he  could 
not  well  say,  and  he  agreed  with  me  that  it  might  be 
better  for  him  to  stay.  We  counted  up  the  remaining 
families  together,  and  found  them  twenty,  and  I  con- 
vinced him  that  by  the  most  modest  computation  here 

151 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

were  twenty  dollars  in  fees  before  him.  I  thought  that 
I  had  secured  his  allegiance  to  the  end,  but  the  very 
morning  before  the  pensive  record  of  these  events  I 
went  to  look  for  him  in  his  accustomed  place  to  get 
my  shoes  "  shined,"  and  he  was  not  there.  The  barber 
was  there,  looking  in  a  vague  disoccupation  across  the 
marshes  to  the  northward  of  the  hotel,  and  I  asked 
him  where  the  porter  was.  He  closed  his  eyes  that 
he  might  open  his  lips  more  impressively  and  breathed 
the  word  "  Andato." 

"Gone?"  I  echoed. 

The  barber  was  a  beautifully  smiling,  richly  lan- 
guaged  Sicilian,  and  he  responded  in  an  elegant  sym- 
pathy with  my  dismay :  u  Si ;  andato.  Me  ne  vado 
anch'  io,  fra  pochi  giorni.  M'  impazzo  qui.  Guardi !" 
(Yes;  gone.  I  am  going,  I  myself,  in  a  few  days.  I 
madden  here.  Look!).  With  the  last  word  he  touched 
my  arm  lightly  to  make  me  turn,  and  pointed  to  the 
long  plank  footway,  stilted  upon  the  marshes  from  one 
to  the  other  side  of  the  railroad  curve,  and  leading 
to  the  boat-house  on  the  bay  beyond  their  wide  levels. 
Midway  of  this  I  saw  a  solitary  figure,  whose  lank 
length  and  forward  droop  I  could  not  mistake.  The 
departing  porter  looked  like  the  last  citizen  abandoning 
the  ruins  of  Persepolis,  and  I — I  felt  like  Persepolis! 


VIII 

I  strive,  perhaps  in  vain,  to  impart  a  sense  of  the 
slowly  creeping  desolation,  the  gradual  paresis,  that 
was  seizing  upon  the  late  full  and  happy  life  of  our 
hotel;  and  I  have  not  strictly  observed  the  order  of 
the  successive  events.  I  have  not  spoken  of  the  swift 
evanescence  of  the  bell-boys,  the  first  of  whom  began 

152 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

so  jubilantly  with,  me  when  I  came,  covenanting  to 
deliver  a  pitcher  of  ice-water  at  my  door  every  morn- 
ing at  ten  and  every  evening  at  eight.  He  was  faith- 
ful to  his  trust,  and  embarrassed  me  with  a  superfluity 
of  ice-water,  which  ten  men  could  hardly  have  drunk 
and  lived;  but,  when  the  economic  frame  of  our  hotel 
began  to  be  shaken,  he  was  early  in  warning  me  that 
he  might  go  at  any  moment.  He  was  ~No.  18,  but  he 
promised  me  that  No.  10  would  see  that  I  was  daily 
and  nightly  deluged  with  ice-water,  and  No.  10  was 
exemplarily  true  to  me  for  a  day.  Then  he  vanished, 
too,  with  a  grateful  sense,  I  hope,  of  my  folly  in  be- 
stowing a  preliminary  half-dollar  upon  him.  But  he 
had  made  interest  for  me,  I  found,  with  "No.  4,  and 
~No.  4  deluded  me  by  his  fleeting  permanency  for  a 
week.  One  morning  he  told  me  he  was  going,  and  he 
took  a  last  half-dollar  from  me  with  a  true  compassion, 
for  my  forlorn  case.  He  was  so  visibly  the  last  of 
the  bell-boys  that  he  could  not  assign  me  to  a  lower 
number.  For  one  night  the  head-porter  brought  my 
ice-water.  Now  the  night-porter  brings  it,  and  if  he 
should  leave  before  I  do —  But  I  will  not  anticipate, 
as  the  older  romancers  used  to  say.  I  will  not  look 
forward,  even  in  the  case  of  the  chambermaids,  of 
whom  there  have  been  already  three  changes,  with  the 
prospect  next  week  of  having  in  some  of  the  laundry 
girls  to  do  up  the  work. 

IX 

The  laundry  itself  was  attacked  ten  days  ago  by  the 
general  paralysis  of  the  hotel's  functions,  so  far  as  the 
guests'  linen  was  concerned,  which  has  since  had  to 
be  sent  far  inland  by  the  enterprise  of  one  of  the  bath- 
ing-pavilion men,  and  precariously  returned  on  a  vari- 

153 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

able  date.  I  forget  whether  the  laundry  succumbed 
before  or  after  the  closing  of  the  refreshment  -  room. 
The  hotel  sold  no  strong  drinks,  and  the  magnificent 
facilities  of  the  bar  were  inadequately  employed  by  a 
soda-fountain,  a  variety  of  mineral  waters  in  bottles, 
a  supply  of  ginger-ale,  and  lemons  for  lemonade.  On 
an  opposite  counter  were  Huyler's  candies  and  a 
choice  of  chewing-gum — the  salubrious  pepsin  or  the 
merely  innocent  peppermint.  When  the  moment  for 
dismantling  this  festive  place  arrived,  with  the  unex- 
pectedness of  all  the  other  moments  of  our  slow  de- 
habilitation,  I  was  present,  and  saw  the  presiding 
genius  packing  up  his  stock  of  lemons.  It  gave  me 
a  peculiar  pang.  I  had  never  bought  any  of  them,  or 
wanted  any,  but  I  had  personally  acquainted  myself 
with  almost  every  example  of  the  fruit;  I  knew  those 
lemons  apart,  and  from  often  study  of  them  on  their 
shelf,  as  I  stood  hardily  sipping  my  ginger-ale  before 
the  counter,  I  was  almost  as  intimate  with  them  as 
with  the  stock  of  the  newsdealer. 

I  must  say  that  as  to  the  books  his  stock  was  ter- 
ribly dull.  He  owned  himself  that  it  was  dull,  and 
when  I  asked  him  where  in  the  world  he  got  together 
such  a  lot  of  stupid  books,  he  could  only  say  that 
they  were  such  as  were  appointed  to  be  sold  in  sum- 
mer hotels  by  the  news  company.  The  newspapers 
were  rather  better :  if  they  were  not  livelier,  they  were 
lighter,  or  at  least  more  ephemeral.  I  bought  freely 
of  them — the  dailies  in  the  mornings  and  the  weeklies 
in  the  afternoons,  with  their  longer  leisure.  I  bought 
the  magazines,  which  are  now  often  as  cheap  as  the 
papers,  and,  unlike  the  books,  are  seldom  dull  all 
through.  Then  I  formed  the  intimacy  of  many  illus- 
trated papers  which  I  did  not  buy,  but  studied  on  the 
strings  where  they  hung  stretched  high  over  the  coun- 

154 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

ter.  In  one  was  the  picture  of  a  young  lady  habited 
in  the  mingled  colors  of  Yale  and  Princeton,  with  a 
Cupid  throwing  a  football  at  her  heart.  She  was  a 
great  resource,  and  could  not  be  stared  out  of  counte- 
nance. 

Besides,  there  was  on  a  wire  frame  over  the  show- 
case a  platter,  of  native  decoration,  representing  the 
whole  of  Long  Island  in  a  railroad  map.  It  was  a 
strangely  ugly  object,  like  some  sort  of  sad,  dissected 
fish,  but  fascinating.  The  newsdealer  and  I  had  often 
discussed  its  price,  and  I  had  invariably  refused  it  at 
one  dollar  and  twenty-five  cents,  though  it  was  orig- 
inally put  upon  the  market  at  two  dollars  and  fifty 
cents. 

After  he  had  packed  up  his  stock,  I  could  hold  out 
no  longer.  I  looked  about  for  him,  and  found  him 
playing  checkers  with  the  ex-keeper  of  the  refreshment- 
room.  I  asked  him  if  that  hideous  platter  had  now 
got  down  to  a  dollar,  and  he  went  and  hunted  it  out 
of  his  stock.  Upon  inspection  he  seemed  to  discover 
that  it  was  still  one  dollar  and  twenty-five  cents.  In  a 
desperation  I  paid  the  money;  and  almost  at  the  same 
moment  the  newsdealer's  place  knew  him  no  more,  and 
I  remained  with  my  platter  for  a  memorial  of  one  of 
the  weirdest  experiences  of  a  life  which  has  not  been 
barren  of  weirdness. 


"  You  ought  to  have  seen  an  old-time  closing  of  this 
hotel,"  said  the  clerk  one  evening  toward  the  last.  He 
had  by  this  time  resumed  in  his  own  person  almost 
as  many  functions  as  the  ancient  mariner  of  the  "  Bab 
Ballad "  who  had  eaten  the  former  survivors  of  the 
Nancy  brig  and  claimed  to  represent  them  all  by  vir- 

155 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

tue  of  his  superior  appetite  and  digestion.  Our  clerk 
was  now  cashier,  postmaster,  room-clerk,  night-clerk, 
and  day-clerk,  with  moments  of  bell-boy ;  he  spoke  with 
authority,  and  we  listened  with  the  respect  due  to  his 
manifold  quality. 

"  The  guests,"  he  continued,  "  would  run  down  tow- 
ard the  end  of  August  to  about  two  hundred.  Then 
notice  would  be  put  up  in  the  office,  (  The  hotel  will 
close  to-morrow  after  breakfast.'  The  band  would  be 
still  here,  and  the  bell-boys  all  on  duty,  and  the  night 
before  all  the  guests  would  gather  in  the  office.  The 
band  would  play,  and  the  talking  and  laughing  would 
go  on  all  through  the  evening,  like  the  height  of  the 
season,  and  perhaps  there  would  be  a  little  dancing. 
Everybody  would  say  good-night,  the  same  as  ever, 
and  as  soon  as  breakfast  was  over  in  the  morning  you 
would  see  them  streaming  away  to  the  train,  till  there 
wasn't  a  soul  left  in  the  house  but  clerks  and  the  help. 
Then  this  stair  carpet  would  come  down  with  a  run/' 
He  pointed  to  the  wide  stairway.  "  The  rugs  would 
come  up  all  through  the  halls;  the  dining-room  would 
be  cleared  before  you  could  look,  and  all  the  chairs 
would  be  on  the  tables  with  their  legs  in  the  air.  The 
help  would  come  to  the  desk  in  a  steady  file  and  get 
their  money  and  go.  Before  noon  the  cleaners  would 
have  the  whole  house  to  themselves." 

We  owned  that  it  must  have  been  fine,  that  it  was 
spectacular  and  impressive,  even  dramatic,  but  in  our 
hearts  we  felt  that  there  was  a  finer  poetic  quality  in 
our  closing,  which  was  like  one  of  the  slow  processes 
of  nature,  and  emulated  the  pensive  close  of  summer, 
when  the  leaves  do  not  all  fall  in  a  night,  or  the  flowers 
wither  or  the  grass  droop  in  a  single  day,  but  the  trees 
slowly  drop  their  crowns  through  many  weeks,  and  the 

successive  frosts  lay  a  chill  touch  on  a  blossom  here 

156 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

and  a  petal  there,  and  the  summer  passes  in  a  euthan- 
asy  which  suffers  you  to  say  at  no  given  moment,  "  The 
summer  is  dead,"  till  it  has  long  been  dead. 

Several  aspects  of  the  elementally  simple  landscape 
about  us  seemed  peculiarly  to  sympathize  with  the 
quiet  passing  of  the  life  of  the  great  hotel.  There 
could  be  no  change  in  the  long,  irregular,  gray  sand 
dunes  before  it,  which  dropped  themselves  in  lumpish 
masses,  like  the  stretched  and  twisted  shape  of  some 
vast  bisected  serpent.  The  stiff  grasses  and  arid  weeds 
that  clothed  them  thinly,  like  a  growth  of  dreadful 
green  hair,  kept  their  rigidity  and  their  color  with  a 
sort  of  terrestrial  immortality,  or  rather  of  an  imper- 
ishable lifelessness ;  but  over  them  fluttered  a  multi- 
tude of  butterflies,  thick  as  the  leaves  of  autumn,  and 
of  much  the  same  ultimate  color,  like  spirits  already 
released  to  their  palingenesis.  Flights  of  others,  of  a 
gay  white  and  yellow,  like  the  innocent  souls  of  little 
ones,  haunted  the  leaf-plant  beds  before  the  hotel,  or 
tried  to  make  friends  with  the  harsh  little  evergreens 
surviving  the  plantations  of  a  more  courageous  period 
of  the  enterprise,  and  stolidly  presenting  a  wood  at 
the  borders  of  the  plank  walks.  To  the  landward  the 
mighty  marshes  stretched  their  innumerable  acres  to  the 
sunrise  and  the  sunset  and  the  northern  lights,  one 
wash  of  pale  yellow-green.  Before  we  left,  this  began 
to  be  splashed  as  with  flame  or  blood  by  the  redden- 
ing of  that  certain  small  weed  which  loves  the  salt  of 
tide-flooded  meadows.  The  hollyhock-like  bells  of  the 
marsh -roses  drooped  and  fell,  but  other  and  gayer 
flowers,  like  ox-eye  daisies  of  taller  stem,  came  to  re- 
place them;  and  still,  with  the  rising  tide,  the  larger 
and  the  lesser  craft  that  plied  upon  the  many  channels 
of  the  meadows  blew  softly  back  and  fortE  and  seemed 
to  sail  upon  their  undulant  grasses. 

157 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

In  all,  the  large  leisure,  the  serene  lapse  of  nature 
toward  decay,  seemed  to  express  a  consciousness  of  the 
hotel's  unhurried  dissolution,  to  wait  gently  upon  it, 
and  to  stay  in  a  faithful  summer  loveliness  till  the  last 
light  should  be  quenched,  of  all  those  that  had  made 
rt  flame  like  a  jewel  in  the  forehead  of  the  sea,  and 
that  had  faded  from  veranda  and  balcony  to  the  glitter 
of  the  clustered  lamps  in  the  office  and  dining-room. 


XI 


There  came,  indeed,  about  the  middle  of  September 
a  sudden  rude  shock  of  cold,  which  seemed  to  express 
an  impatience  with  the  dying  hotel,  hitherto  unknown 
to  the  gently  varying  moods  of  nature.  The  wind  blew 
for  a  day  from  the  northwest,  and  stiffened  its  wasted 
and  flaccid  frame  until  one  fancied  its  teeth  chattering, 
as  it  were;  but  even  then  the  sea  did  not  share  the 
harsh  sentiment  of  the  inland  weather.  It  lay  smiling 
as  serenely  as  ever,  and  the  fleet  of  fishing  sloops  and 
schooners  that  began  to  flock  before  our  beach  about 
the  end  of  August  rocked  and  tilted,  like  things  in  a 
dream,  as  they  had  for  the  last  fortnight.  It  was  said 
that  one  of  them  dragged  her  anchor  and  came  ashore 
in  the  night,  but  this  happened  in  the  dark,  and  we 
knew  of  it  only  by  hearsay,  after  she  had  got  off  and 
sailed  away.  A  day  later  they  were  all  there  again, 
and  some  flew  in  close  to  the  beach,  and  skimmed 
back  and  forth,  as  fearless  of  its  ever-shifting  sands  as 
the  fish-hawks  that  sailed  the  deeps  of  blue  air  above 
them. 

The  water  remained  as  warm  as  ever;  warmer,  they 
said,  who  tried  it  in  a  bath.  I  did  not.  The  next  to 
the  last  time  I  bathed  I  had  for  sole  companion  a  lit- 

158 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

erary  clergyman,  with  whom  I  walked  down  to  the 
beach  discussing  the  amusing  aspects  of  the  Ninth 
Crusade,  which  the  Venetians  so  cannily  turned  aside 
from  the  conquest  of  the  Holy  Land  to  the  conquest 
of  Constantinople.  The  New  York  Dump  was  unpleas- 
antly evident  in  the  sea  that  day;  and  the  last  time 
the  Dump  had  the  sea  all  to  itself.  It  is  not  agreeable 
to  bathe  among  old  brooms,  bottles,  decayed  fruit, 
trunk  lids,  vegetable  cans,  broken  boxes,  and  the  other 
refuse  of  the  ash-barrel,  and  I  came  out  almost  before 
the  life-guard  could  get  ready  to  throw  me  a  life-pre- 
server. 

He  was  not  the  gaudy  giant  of  bronze  who  posed 
between  the  life-lines  at  the  height  of  the  bathing  sea- 
son, when  twoscore  spectators  on  the  benches  provided 
for  them  watched  a  half-dozen  men  and  women  wel- 
tering in  the  surf,  or  popping  up  and  down  after  the 
manner  of  ladies  taking  a  sea-bath.  But  I  dare  say 
he  was  quite  as  efficient,  and,  as  I  had  the  good-fort- 
une to  make  his  acquaintance,  I  liked  him  better.  I 
specially  liked  his  pelting  about  the  bathing-pavilion 
before  he  went  on  duty  with  me,  in  his  bare  legs  and 
feet,  and  wearing  over  his  bathing-tights  a  cutaway 
coat,  with  a  derby  hat,  to  complete  his  ceremonial  cos- 
tume. 

He  was  not  so  much  in  keeping  with  the  inlander's 
ideal  of  bathing-beaches,  where  summer  girls  float  in 
the  waves  or  loll  upon  the  sands  in  the  flirtatious  poses 
familiar  to  the  observer  of  them  in  the  illustrated  pa- 
pers. To  guard  these  daring  maids  from  the  dangers 
of  the  deep  the  gaudy  bronze  giant,  with  his  yachting 
cap,  his  black  jerseys,  his  white  shoes,  and  his  brown 
arms  folded  upon  his  breast,  where  they  half  revealed, 
half  hid  his  label  of  Life-Guard,  was  a  far  fitter  figure. 
But  for  the  real  bathers  I  think  the  guard  in  the  cut- 

159 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

away,  derby,  and  bare  feet  was  much  more  to  be  trust- 
ed ;  he  was  simple,  substantial,  and  unpretentious ;  and 
surf-bathing,  let  me  whisper  in  the  innumerable  ear  of 
the  inland  myriads  who  have  never  seen  it,  is  not  often 
the  gay  frolic  they  have  fancied:  rather,  it  is  sober, 
serious,  sloppy. 

XII 

At  first  the  mental  frame  of  us  lingerers  in  the  clos- 
ing hotel  was  one  of  heroic  self-applause.  We  wore  a 
brave  and  smiling  front ;  we  said  it  was  so  much  nicer 
than  when  the  house  was  full,  than  when  there  were  a 
thousand  or  even  a  hundred  in  it ;  and  we  all  declared 
that  we  were  going  to  stay  as  long  as  the  landlord 
would  let  us.  But  from  time  to  time  there  were  de- 
fections; one  table  after  another  was  dismantled;  face 
after  face  vanished;  first  a  white  face,  then  a  black 
face.  I  do  not  think  we  were  so  smiling  after  four  of 
the  beach  trains  were  taken  off;  secretly,  I  think  each 
of  us  wondered,  What  if  we  should  stay  till  the  last 
train  was  taken  off  and  we  could  not  get  away !  What 
should  we  do  then  ? 

We  have  become  rather  more  serious;  we  do  not 
talk  trivially  when  we  talk,  and  we  scarcely  talk  at  all ; 
we  have  traversed  each  other's  conversable  territory  so 
often  that  there  is  no  longer  the  hope  of  discovery  in 
it.  We  have  not  only  become  serious;  I  have  reached 
the  point  where  I  have  asked  in  thought  if  we  are  not 
a  little  absurd.  Why  should  we  stay  ?  What  is  keep- 
ing us?  The  waves  of  autumn  will  soon  reach  the 
kitchen  fires ;  and  then  ? 

Last  night  our  waiter  said  he  was  going  on  Monday. 
This  morning  the  newsboy  passed  through  the  office 
on  his  way  to  serve  the  cottagers  with  the  papers. 

160 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

Asked  if  he  were  not  going  to  serve  the  hotel  guests, 
he  went  on  without  answering.  It  may  he  because  he 
is  an  officer  of  a  railroad,  whose  officers  reluctantly 
answer  questions;  but  perhaps  he  has  come  to  feel  a 
ghostly  quality  in  us,  and  regard  us  as  so  many  simu- 
lacra incapable  of  interest  in  the  affairs  of  real  men. 

The  gas  was  not  lighted  in  the  ballroom  after  dinner 
yesterday;  the  halls  gloomed  like  illimitable  caverns 
late  in  the  gathered  dusk. 

Shall  I  be  able  to  stay  till  Friday  ?    We  shall  see. 


XIII 

A  most  resplendent  Sunday  is  passing.  The  cold 
wind  of  last  night  has  blown  the  whole  world  clean  of 
clouds.  One  has  a  sense  of  the  globe  swinging  in  depths 
of  translucent  ether,  stainless  through  all  the  reaches 
of  space. 

The  sea  is  blue  as  the  sky.  It  quivers  where  the 
sun  slants  upon  it,  and  reflects  the  rays  from  myriad 
facets  of  steel.  You  cannot  look  at  it  long  there,  but 
now  you  begin  to  understand  what  Tennyson  meant 
when  he  called  it 

"  The  million-spangled  sapphire  marriage-ring  of  the  land." 

All  day  yesterday,  which  was  the  great  day  for  the 
arriving  European  steamers,  they  came  hurrying  in. 
We  counted  ten  or  twelve,  each  blocking  the  length 
of  an  express  train  out  of  the  rim  of  the  horizon.  To- 
day there  are  none :  only  a  few  far  -  off  full  -  sailed 
ships,  and  nearer  shore  the  fleet  of  fishing  sloops  and 
schooners,  tilting  and  swaying,  and  now  and  then  fly- 
ing in  so  close  to  the  beach  that  we  can  see  the  men 

161 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

on  board,  and  trailing  their  small  boats  through  a  drift 
of  foamy  sea. 

There  are  twenty -three  guests  in  the  house  now — 
the  house  that  holds  a  thousand!  Two  hunters  came 
down  with  their  guns  Friday  night  and  re-enforced  us. 
After  breakfast  a  gay  group  gathered  on  the  great  mid- 
most stairway  of  the  veranda,  and  one  of  the  men  told 
the  ladies  stories  and  made  them  laugh.  Every  one  is 
acquainted  now,  and  speaks  freely  to  every  one  else. 
It  is  rather  weird.  Should  we  be  so  civil  if  we  were 
normally  conditioned  ? 

We  have  a  very  good  two-o'clock  dinner:  the  cook 
still  remembers  it  is  Sunday.  After  dinner  two  of  us 
go  down  to  the  bathing-beach,  and  from  the  spectators' 
benches  watch  a  soft-shell  crab  which  has  been  bath- 
ing and  is  now  lying  in  the  warm  sand  where  the 
rising  tide  has  flung  him.  We  wait  to  see  it  reach 
him  again  and  draw  him  back,  but  it  does  not.  It 
seems  to  me  that  he  is  unhappy  in  the  sun,  and  I  take 
a  stick  and  tilt  him  into  the  sea.  I  do  not  know 
whether  he  likes  that,  either;  but  he  cannot  help  him- 
self. He  could  not  help  himself  in  the  sun. 


XIV 

It  is  Monday  morning  now,  and  the  world  is  wrapped 
in  cold  gray  clouds,  which  seem  to  have  meant  some- 
thing unpleasant  to  the  fishing-craft,  for  they  have  all 
vanished  but  two  of  the  bolder  sail.  It  rains  a  little 
and  then  stops.  A  wind,  heavy  with  the  salt  breath 
of  the  sea,  rises  steadily,  and  bemoans  itself  in  all  the 
angles  and  projections  of  the  house.  The  lanterns  of 
the  veranda,  which  have  not  been  lighted  for  a  week, 

rattle  dolefully  in  the  blast.     Under  them,  the  long 

162 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

line  of  rocking-chairs  in  which  a  quarter  of  a  mile  of 
ladies  used  to  sit  and  gossip  together  stretches  emptily 
away.  The  wind  pushes  against  the  tall  backs  of  the 
chairs,  and  they  rock  softly  to  and  fro,  as  if  the  ghosts 
of  the  gossipers  invisibly  filled  them  and  still  inaudibly 
babbled  on.  Where  some  of  the  chairs  are  grouped 
facing  one  another,  the  effect  is  very  creepy.  Will  they 
keep  up  their  spectral  colloquies  all  winter? 

I  escape  from  this  eery  sight  to  my  own  room,  and 
in  the  corridor,  three  up-town  blocks  away,  I  behold  a 
small  chambermaid  balancing  herself  against  a  large 
bucket  as  she  wavers  slowly  down.  It  is  tragic. 

The  wind  rises,  and  by  mid-afternoon  blows  half  a 
gale.  The  sea  froths  and  roars  and  tumbles  on  the 
beach,  and  far  out  the  serried  breakers  toss  their  white- 
caps  against  the  sky-line,  like  so  many  cooks  abandon- 
ing the  hotel  kitchen. 

About  three  o'clock  the  life-guard  of  the  bathing- 
beach,  having  cast  his  derby  and  cutaway,  appears  with 
three  other  men  in  tights  and  pulls  in  the  life  -  lines 
and  the  buoys.  ~Now  the  Dump  will  have  the  ocean  for 
its  own.  , 

A  stranded  boat  which  lies  on  the  beach  to  the  north- 
ward came  ashore  in  the  gale  last  night  from  some  of 
the  fishermen.  It  is  in  good  condition,  and  if  the  trains 
should  stop  running  before  noon  to-morrow  we  can  be 
taken  off  in  it.  Eighteen  of  our  number  went  away 
this  morning;  and  there  are  now  but  four  of  us  left. 
We  could  easily  get  away  in  that  boat. 


XV 


The  wind  rose  till  nightfall,  and  then  its  passion 
broke  in  tears.     A  tempestuous  night  threatened;  but 

xa  163 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

the  weather  changed  its  mind  as  swiftly  as  a  woman, 
and  the  day  dawned  as  sweetly  and  softly  this  morn- 
ing as  a  day  of  young  June.  The  sea  is  again  a 
shining  level,  veiled  in  a  tender  mist.  Out  of  this  the 
fishing-sail  come  stealing  silently  one  after  another  till 
again  a  fleet  of  them  is  tilting  and  swaying  in  front 
of  the  hotel.  One  large,  goblin  sail,  which  remained 
throughout  the  threats  of  the  weather,  looks  like  the 
picture  of  the  goblin  in  the  "  Bab  Ballad  "  which  tries 
to  frighten  the  image  before  the  tobacconist's  shop. 

The  gang  of  Italians  who  have  toiled  for  three 
months  to  hide  the  infamies  of  the  Dump,  burying 
them  in  the  sand  as  fast  as  the  sea  cast  them  ashore, 
are  taking  up  the  plank  walks  to  the  bathing-beach. 
The  season  is  over.  The  barrel  which  formed  the 
outermost  buoy  swings  monumentally  (if  monuments 
can  swing)  at  anchor  among  the  breakers. 

At  the  station  the  railroad  people  have  become  un- 
naturally amiable.  They  call  me  by  name;  they  take 
a  personal  interest  in  getting  off  my  telegrams  and 
express  packages.  In  one  of  my  visits  to  them  I  meet 
the  life-guard  in  full  citizen's  dress,  with  even  shoes 
on.  He  salutes  me,  but  I  have  to  look  twice  before 
I  know  him. 

XVI 

A  generous  contention  has  arisen  between  ourselves 
and  the  other  remaining  family  as  to  which  shall  be 
last  to  leave  the  hotel.  They  go  on  the  10.25,  and 
we  have  outstayed  them!  We  are  the  last  guests  in 
the  house.  The  landlord's  Italian  greyhound  seems 
instinctively  to  feel  our  pathetic  distinction.  He  rushes 
upon  me  from  far  down  the  veranda  and  fawns  upon 
me. 

164 


THE    CLOSING    OF    THE    HOTEL 

The  cook  and  a  last  helper  of  some  unknown  func- 
tion carry  our  trunks  to  the  station.  But  it  has  now 
suddenly  become  a  question  whether  we  shall  go  on 
the  12.20  or  wait  for  the  5.20.  It  depends  finally 
upon  our  getting  a  last  lunch  at  the  restaurant  of  the 
bathing-beach.  We  ask,  limiting  our  demands  to  a 
clam-chowder.  We  are  answered  that  there  are  still 
clams,  but  the  man  who  knows  how  to  make  chowder 
is  gone.  The  restaurant  family  are  going  to  lunch 
upon  a  ham  -  bone,  which  is  now  being  scraped  for 
them.  We  refuse  to  share  it,  with  many  thanks,  and 
decide  to  go  on  the  12.20. 

I  have  paid  my  last  bill. 

On  the  10th  of  August  a  pomp  of  liveried  menials 
met  me  as  I  alighted  from  the  train  and  contented 
for  the  honor  and  profit  of  carrying  my  umbrella  into 
the  hotel. 

On  the  17th  of  September  I  myself  carry  a  heavy 
satchel  in  each  hand  out  through  the  echoing  corridors 
down  the  wide  veranda  stairs  to  the  train,  unattended 
by  a  single  fee-taker. 

The  hotel  is  closed. 


GLIMPSES   OF   CE1STTKAL   PAKK 

THIS  morning,  as  I  sat  on  a  bench  in  one  of  the 
most  frequented  walks  of  Central  Park,  I  could  almost 
have  touched  the  sparrows  on  the  sprays  about  me; 
a  squirrel,  foraging  for  nuts,  climbed  on  my  knees  as 
if  to  explore  my  pockets.  Of  course,  there  is  a  police- 
man at  every  turn  to  see  that  no  wrong  is  done  these 
pretty  creatures,  and  that  no  sort  of  trespass  is  com- 
mitted by  any  in  the  domain  of  all ;  but  I  like  to  think 
that  the  security  and  immunity  of  the  Park  is  proof 
of  something  besides  the  vigilance  of  its  guardians; 
that  it  is  a  hint  of  a  growing  sense  in  Americans  that 
what  is  common  is  the  personal  charge  of  every  one  in 
the  community. 

As  I  turn  from  my  page  and  look  out  upon  it,  I  see 
the  domes  and  spires  of  its  foliage  beginning  to  feel 
the  autumn  and  taking  on  the  wonderful  sunset  tints 
of  the  year  in  its  decline;  when  I  stray  through  its 
pleasant  paths,  I  feel  the  pathos  of  the  tender  October 
air;  but,  better  than  these  sensuous  delights,  in  every- 
thing of  it  and  in  it,  I  imagine  a  prophecy  of  the 
truer  state  which  I  believe  America  is  destined  yet  to 
see  established.  It  cannot  be  that  the  countless  thou- 
sands who  continually  visit  it,  and  share  equally  in 
its  beauty,  can  all  come  away  insensible  of  the  mean- 
ing of  it;  here  and  there  some  one  must  ask  himself, 
and  then  ask  others,  why  the  whole  of  life  should  not 

be  as  generous  and  as  just  as  this  part  of  it;  why  he 

166 


GLIMPSES    OF    CENTRAL    PARK 

should  not  have  a  country  as  palpably  his  own  as  the 
Central  Park  is,  where  his  ownership  excludes  the 
ownership  of  no  other.  Some  workman  out  of  work, 
as  he  trudges  aimlessly  through  its  paths,  must  won- 
der why  the  city  cannot  minister  to  his  need  as  well 
as  his  pleasure,  and  not  hold  aloof  from  him  till  he 
is  thrown  a  pauper  on  its  fitful  charities.  If  it  can 
give  him  this  magnificent  garden  for  his  forced  leisure, 
why  cannot  it  give  him  a  shop  where  he  can  go  in 
extremity  to  earn  his  bread  ? 


I  may  be  mistaken.  His  thoughts  may  never  take 
this  turn  at  all.  The  poor  are  slaves  of  habit,  they 
bear  what  they  have  borne,  they  suffer  on  from  gen- 
eration to  generation,  and  seem  to  look  for  nothing 
different.  But  this  is  what  I  think  for  poor  people  in 
the  Park,  not  alone  for  the  workman  recently  out  of 
work,  but  for  the  workman  so  long  out  of  it  that  he 
has  rotted  into  one  of  the  sodden  tramps  whom  I  meet 
now  and  then,  looking  like  some  forlorn  wild  beast,  in 
the  light  of  the  autumnal  leaves.  That  is  the  great 
trouble  in  New  York;  you  cannot  anywhere  get  away 
from  the  misery  of  life.  You  would  think  that  the 
rich  for  their  own  sakes  would  wish  to  see  conditions 
bettered,  so  that  they  might  not  be  confronted  at  every 
turn  by  the  mere  loathliness  of  poverty.  But  they  like- 
wise are  the  slaves  of  habit,  and  go  the  way  the  rich 
have  gone  since  the  beginning  of  time.  Sometimes  I 
think  that  as  Shakespeare  says  of  the  living  and  the 
dead,  the  rich  and  the  poor  are  "but  as  pictures"  to 
one  another  without  vital  reality. 

Sometimes  I  am  glad  to  lose  the  sense  of  their  real- 

167 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

ity,  and  this  is  why  I  would  rather  walk  in  the  path- 
ways of  the  Park  than  in  the  streets  of  the  city,  for 
the  contrasts  there  are  not  so  frequent,  if  they  are  glar- 
ing still.'  I  do  get  away  from  them  now  and  then,  for 
a  moment  or  two,  and  give  myself  wholly  up  to  the 
delight  of  the  place.  It  has  been  treated  with  the 
artistic  sense  which  always  finds  its  best  expression 
in  the  service  of  the  community,  but  I  do  not  think 
we  generally  understand  this,  the  civic  spirit  is  so 
weak  in  us  yet;  and  I  doubt  if  the  artists  them- 
selves are  conscious  of  it,  they  are  so  rarely  given  the 
chance  to  serve  the  community.  When  this  chance 
offers,  however,  it  finds  the  right  man  to  profit  by  it, 
as  in  the  system  of  parks  at  Chicago,  the  gardened 
spaces  at  Washington,  and  the  Central  Park  in  "New 
York. 

Some  of  the  decorative  features  here  are  bad,  the 
sculpture  is  often  foolish  or  worse,  and  the  architect- 
ure is  the  outgrowth  of  a  mood,  where  it  is  not  merely 
puerile.  The  footways  have  been  asphalted,  and  this 
is  out  of  keeping  with  the  rustic  character  of  the  place, 
but  the  whole  design,  and  much  of  the  detail  in  the 
treatment  of  the  landscape,  bears  the  stamp  of  a  kindly 
and  poetic  genius.  The  Park  is  in  no  wise  taken  away 
from  Nature,  but  is  rendered  back  to  her,  when  all 
has  been  done  to  beautify  it,  an  American  woodland, 
breaking  into  meadows,  here  and  there,  and  brightened 
with  pools  and  ponds  lurking  among  rude  masses  of 
rock,  and  gleaming  between  leafy  knolls  and  grassy 
levels.  It  stretches  and  widens  away,  mile  after  mile, 
in  the  heart  of  the  city — a  memory  of  the  land  as  it 
was  before  the  havoc  of  the  city  began,  and  giving  to 
the  city-prisoned  poor  an  image  of  what  the  free  coun- 
try still  is,  everywhere.  It  is  all  penetrated  by  well- 
kept  drives  and  paths;  and  it  is  in  these  paths  that  I 

168 


GLIMPSES    OF    CENTRAL    PARK 

find  my  pleasure.  They  are  very  simple  woodland 
paths,  but  for  the  asphalt;  though  here  and  there  an 
effect  of  art  is  studied  with  charming  felicity;  and  I 
like  to  mount  some  steps  graded  in  the  rock  at  one 
place  and  come  upon  a  plinth  supporting  the  bust  of  a 
poet,  as  I  might  in  an  old  Italian  garden.  But  there 
is  otherwise  very  little  effect  of  gardening  except  near 
the  large  fountain  by  the  principal  lake  where  there  is 
some  flare  of  flowers  on  the  sloping  lawns.  There  is 
an  excess  in  the  viaduct,  with  its  sweeping  stairways 
and  carven  freestone  massiveness;  but  it  is  charming 
in  a  way,  too,  and  the  basin  of  the  fountain  is  full  of 
lotuses  and  papyrus  reeds,  so  that  you  do  not  much 
notice  the  bronze  angle  atop,  who  seems  to  be  holding 
her  skirt  to  one  side  and  picking  her  steps,  and  to  be 
rather  afraid  of  falling  into  the  water.  There  is,  in 
fact,  only  one  thoroughly  good  piece  of  sculpture  in 
the  Park,  which  I  am  glad  to  find  in  sympathy  with 
the  primeval  suggestiveness  of  the  landscape-garden- 
ing: an  American  Indian  hunting  with  his  dog,  as  the 
Indians  must  have  hunted  through  the  wilds  here  be- 
fore the  white  men  came. 


II 


This  group  is  always  a  great  pleasure  to  me,  from 
whatever  point  I  come  upon  it,  or  catch  a  glimpse  of 
it;  and  I  like  to  go  and  find  the  dog's  prototype  in 
the  wolves  at  the  menagerie  which  the  city  offers  free 
to  the  wonder  of  the  crowds  constantly  thronging  its 
grounds  and  houses.  The  captive  brutes  seem  to  be 
of  that  solidarity  of  good-fellowship  which  unites  all 
the  frequenters  of  the  Park ;  the  tigers  and  the  stupidly 
majestic  lions  have  an  air  different  to  me  from  tigers 

and  lions  shown  for  profit.     Among  the  milder  sorts, 

169 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

I  do  not  care  so  much  for  the  wallowing  hippopota- 
muses and  the  lumbering  elephants  and  the  super- 
cilious camels  which  one  sees  in  menageries  every- 
where, as  for  those  types  which  represent  a  period 
as  extinct  as  that  of  the  American  pioneers;  I  have 
rather  a  preference  for  going  and  musing  upon  the 
ragged  bison  pair  as  they  stand  with  their  livid  mouths 
open  at  the  pale  of  their  paddock,  expecting  the  chil- 
dren's peanuts,  and  unconscious  of  their  importance 
as  survivors  of  the  untold  millions  of  their  kind  which 
a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  blackened  the  Western  plains 
for  miles  and  miles.  There  are  now  only  some  forty 
or  fifty  left;  for,  of  all  the  forces  of  our  plutocratic 
conditions,  so  few  are  conservative  that  the  American 
buffalo  is  as  rare  as  the  old-fashioned  American  me- 
chanic, proud  of  his  independence  and  glorying  in  his 
citizenship. 

In  some  other  enclosures  are  pairs  of  beautiful  deer, 
which  I  wish  might  be  enlarged  to  the  whole  extent 
of  the  Park.  But  I  can  only  imagine  them  on  the 
great  sweeps  of  grass,  which  recall  the  savannahs  and 
prairies,  though  there  is  a  very  satisfactory  flock  of 
sheep  which  nibbles  the  herbage  there,  when  these 
spaces  are  not  thrown  open  to  the  ball  -  players  who 
are  allowed  on  certain  days  of  the  week.  I  like  to 
watch  them,  and  so  do  great  numbers  of  other  fre- 
quenters of  the  Park,  apparently;  and  when  I  have 
walked  far  up  beyond  the  reservoirs  of  city  water, 
which  serve  the  purpose  of  natural  lakes  in  the  land- 
scape, I  like  to  come  upon  that  expanse  in  the  heart  of 
the  woods  where  the  tennis-players  have  stretched  their 
nets  over  a  score  of  courts,  and  the  art  students  have 
set  up  their  easels  on  the  edges  of  the  lawns,  for  what 
effect  of  the  autumnal  foliage  they  have  the  luck  or 

the  skill  to  get.    It  is  all  very  sweet  and  friendly,  and 

170 


GLIMPSES    OF    CENTKAL    PAKK 

in  keeping  with  the  purpose  of  the  Park  and  its  frank 
and  simple  treatment  throughout. 


Ill 


I  think  this  treatment  is  best  for  the  greatest  num- 
ber of  those  who  visit  the  place,  and  for  whom  the 
aspect  of  simple  nature  is  the  thing  to  be  desired. 
Their  pleasure  in  it,  as  far  as  the  children  are  con- 
cerned, is  visible  and  audible  enough,  but  I  like,  as  I 
stroll  along,  to  note  the  quiet  comfort  which  the  elder 
people  take  in  this  domain  of  theirs,  as  they  sit  on  the 
benches  in  the  woodland  ways,  or  under  the  arching 
trees  of  the  Mall,  unmolested  by  the  company  of  some 
of  the  worst  of  all  the  bad  statues  in  the  world.  They 
are  mostly  foreigners,  I  believe,  but  I  find  every  now 
and  then  an  American  among  them,  who  has  released 
himself,  or  has  been  forced  by  want  of  work,  to  share 
their  leisure  for  the  time ;  I  fancy  he  has  always  a  bad 
conscience,  if  he  is  taking  the  time  off,  from  the  con- 
tinual pressure  of  our  duty  to  add  dollar  to  dollar  and 
provide  for  the  future  as  well  as  the  present  need. 
The  foreigner,  who  has  been  bred  up  without  the 
American's  hope  of  advancement,  has  not  his  anxiety, 
and  is  a  happier  man,  so  far  as  that  goes ;  but  the  Park 
imparts  something  of  its  peace  to  every  one,  even  to 
some  of  the  people  who  drive  and  form  a  spectacle  for 
those  who  walk. 

For  me  they  all  unite  to  form  a  spectacle  I  never 
cease  to  marvel  at,  with  a  perpetual  hunger  of  conject- 
ure as  to  what  they  really  think  of  one  another.  Ap- 
parently, they  are  all,  whether  they  walk  or  whether 
they  drive,  willing  collectively,  if  not  individually,  to 
go  on  forever  in  the  economy  which  perpetuates  their 

" 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

inequality,  and  makes  a  mock  of  the  polity  which 
assures  them  their  liberty.  The  difference  which 
money  creates  among  men  is  always  preposterous,  and 
whenever  I  take  my  eyes  from  it  the  thing  ceases  to 
be  credible;  yet  this  difference  is  what  the  vast  ma- 
jority of  Americans  have  agreed  to  accept  forever  as 
right  and  justice.  If  I  were  to  go  and  sit  beside  some 
poor  man  in  the  Park,  and  ask  him  why  a  man  no 
better  than  he  was  driving  before  him  in  a  luxurious 
carriage,  he  would  say  that  the  other  man  had  the 
money  to  do  it;  and  he  would  really  think  he  had 
given  me  a  reason ;  the  man  in  the  carriage  himself 
could  not  regard  the  answer  as  more  full  and  final  than 
the  man  on  the  bench.  They  have  both  been  reared 
in  the  belief  that  it  is  a  sufficient  answer,  and  they 
would  both  regard  me  with  the  same  misgiving  if  I 
ventured  to  say  that  it  was  not  a  reason;  for,  if  their 
positions  were  to  be  at  once  reversed,  they  would  both 
acquiesce  in  the  moral  outlawry  of  their  inequality. 
The  man  on  foot  would  think  it  had  simply  come  his 
turn  to  drive  in  a  carriage,  and  the  man  whom  he 
ousted  would  think  it  was  rather  hard  luck,  but  he 
would  realize  that  it  was  what,  at  the  bottom  of  his 
heart,  he  had  always  expected. 

Only  once  have  I  happened  to  find  any  one  who 
questioned  the  situation  from  a  stand-point  outside  of 
it,  and  that  was  a  shabbily  dressed  man  whom  I  over- 
heard talking  to  a  poor  woman  in  one  of  those  pleas- 
ant arbors  which  crown  certain  points  of  rising  ground 
in  the  Park.  She  had  a  paper  bundle  on  the  seat 
beside  her,  and  she  looked  like  some  working-woman 
out  of  place,  with  that  hapless,  wistful  air  which  such 
people  often  have.  Her  poor  little  hands,  which  lay 
in  her  lap,  were  stiffened  and  hardened  with  work, 
but  they  were  clean,  except  for  the  black  of  the  nails, 

172 


GLIMPSES    OF    CENTRAL    PARK 

and  she  was  very  decently  clad  in  garments  beginning 
to  fray  into  rags;  she  had  a  good,  kind,  faithful  face, 
and  she  listened  without  rancor  to  the  man  as  he  un- 
folded the  truth  to  her  concerning  the  conditions  in 
which  they  lived.  It  was  the  wisdom  of  the  poor, 
hopeless,  joyless,  as  it  now  and  then  makes  itself 
heard  in  the  process  of  the  years  and  ages,  and  then 
sinks  again  into  silence.  He  showed  her  how  she  had 
no  permanent  place  in  the  economy,  not  because  she 
had  momentarily  lost  work,  but  because  in  the  nature 
of  things  as  we  have  them,  it  could  only  be  a  question 
of  time  when  she  must  be  thrown  out  of  any  place 
she  found.  He  blamed  no  one;  he  only  blamed  the 
conditions.  I  doubt  whether  his  wisdom  made  the 
friendless  woman  happier,  but  I  could  not  have  gain- 
said it,  when  he  saw  me  listening,  if  he  had  asked, 
"  Isn't  that  the  truth  ?"  I  left  him  talking  sadly  on, 
and  I  never  saw  him  again.  He  was  threadbare,  but 
he,  too,  was  cleanly  and  decent  in  his  dress,  and  not  at 
all  of  that  type  of  agitators  of  whom  we  have  made  an 
effigy  like  nothing  I  have  seen,  as  if  merely  for  the 
childish  pleasure  of  reviling  it. 


IV 

The  whole  incident  was  infinitely  pathetic  to  me; 
and  jet  we  must  not  romance  the  poor,  or  imagine 
that  they  are  morally  better  than  the  rich;  we  must 
not  fancy  that  a  poor  man,  when  he  ceases  to  be  a 
poor  man,  would  be  kinder  for  having  been  poor.  Ho 
would  perhaps  oftener,  and  certainly  more  logically, 
be  unkinder,  for  there  would  be  mixed  with  his  van- 
ity of  possession  a  quality  of  cruel  fear,  an  apprehen- 
sion of  loss,  which  the  man  who  had  always  been  rich 

173 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

would  not  feel.  The  self-made  man,  when  he  has  made 
himself  of  money,  seems  to  have  been  deformed  by 
his  original  destitution,  and  I  think  that  if  I  were  in 
need  I  would  rather  take  my  chance  of  pity  from  the 
man  who  had  never  been  poor.  Of  course,  this  is 
generalization,  and  there  are  instances  to  the  contrary, 
which  at  once  occur  to  me.  But  what  is  absolutely 
true  is  that  our  prosperity,  the  selfish  joy  of  having, 
at  the  necessary  cost  of  those  who  cannot  have,  is 
blighted  by  the  feeling  of  insecurity  which  every 
man  has  in  his  secret  soul,  and  which  the  man  who 
has  known  want  must  have  in  greater  measure  than 
the  man  who  has  never  known  want. 

There  is,  indeed,  no  security  for  wealth,  which  we 
think  the  chief  good  of  life,  in  the  system  that  war- 
rants it.  When  a  man  has  gathered  his  millions,  he 
cannot  be  reduced  to  want,  probably;  but  while  he  is 
amassing  them,  while  he  is  in  the  midst  of  the  fight,  or 
the  game,  as  most  men  are,  there  are  ninety-five  chances 
out  of  a  hundred  that  he  will  be  beaten.  Perhaps  it  is 
best  so,  and  I  should  be  glad  it  was  so  if  I  could  be 
sure  that  the  common  danger  bred  a  common  kindness 
between  the  rich  and  the  poor,  but  it  seems  not  to  do 
so.  As  far  as  I  can  see,  the  rule  of  chance,  which 
they  all  live  under,  does  nothing  more  than  reduce 
them  to  a  community  of  anxieties. 

To  the  eye  of  the  observer  they  have  the  monotony 
of  the  sea,  where  some  tenth  wave  runs  a  little  higher 
than  the  rest,  but  sinks  at  last,  or  breaks  upon  the 
rocks  or  sands,  as  inevitably  as  the  other  nine.  Our 
inequality  is  without  picturesqueness  and  without  dis- 
tinction. The  people  in  the  carriages  are  better  dressed 
than  those  on  foot,  especially  the  women;  but  other- 
wise they  do  not  greatly  differ  from  the  most  of  these. 
The  spectacle  of  the  driving  in  the  Park  has  none 

174 


GLIMPSES    OF    CENTRAL    PARK 

of  that  dignity  which  characterizes  such  spectacles  in 
European  capitals.  This  may  be  because  many  peo- 
ple of  the  finest  social  quality  are  seldom  seen  there, 
or  it  may  be  because  the  differences  growing  out  of 
money  can  never  have  the  effect  of  those  growing  out 
of  birth;  that  a  plutocracy  can  never  have  the  last 
wicked  grace  of  an  aristocracy.  It  would  be  impos- 
sible, for  instance,  to  weave  any  romance  about  the 
figures  you  see  in  our  carriages;  they  do  not  even 
suggest  the  poetry  of  ages  of  prescriptive  wrong;  they 
are  of  to-day,  and  there  is  no  guessing  whether  they 
will  be  of  to-morrow  or  not. 

In  Europe,  this  sort  of  tragi-comedy  is  at  least  well 
played;  but  in  America  you  always  have  the  feeling 
that  the  performance  is  that  of  second-rate  amateurs, 
who,  if  they  would  really  live  out  the  life  implied 
by  America,  would  be  the  superiors  of  the  whole  world. 
I  am  moved  to  laughter  by  some  of  the  things  I  see 
among  them,  when  perhaps  I  ought  to  be  awed,  as, 
for  instance,  by  the  sight  of  a  little,  lavishly  dressed 
lady,  lolling  in  the  corner  of  a  ponderous  landau,  with 
the  effect  of  holding  fast  lest  she  should  be  shaken 
out  of  it,  while  two  powerful  horses,  in  jingling,  sil- 
ver-plated harness,  with  due  equipment  of  coachman 
and  footman,  seated  on  their  bright-buttoned  overcoats 
on  the  box  together,  get  her  majestically  over  the  ground 
at  a  slow  trot.  This  is  what  I  sometimes  see,  with 
not  so  much  reverence  as  I  feel  for  the  simple  mother 
pushing  her  baby-carriage  on  the  asphalt  beside  me  and 
doubtless  envying  the  wonderful  creature  in  the  landau. 
Sometimes  it  is  a  fat  old  man  in  the  landau ;  or  a  hus- 
band and  wife,  not  speaking:  or  a  pair  of  grim  old 
ladies,  who  look  as  if  they  had  lived  so  long  aloof  from, 
their  unluckier  sisters  that  they  could  not  be  too  severe 
with  the  mere  sight  of  them.  Generally  speaking,  the 

I/O 


IMPBESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

people  in  the  carriages  do  not  seem  any  happier  for  be- 
ing there,  though  I  have  sometimes  seen  a  jolly  party 
of  strangers  in  a  public  carriage,  drawn  by  those  broken- 
kneed  horses  which  seem  peculiarly  devoted  to  this  ser- 
vice. 

The  best  place  to  see  the  driving  is  at  a  point  where 
the  different  driveways  converge,  not  far  from  the 
Egyptian  obelisk  which  the  Khedive  gave  us  some 
years  ago,  and  which  we  have  set  up  here  in  one  of 
the  finest  eminences  of  the  Park.  He  had,  of  course, 
no  moral  right  to  rob  his  miserable  land  of  any  one  of 
its  characteristic  monuments,  but  I  do  not  know  that 
it  is  not  as  well  in  New  York  as  in  Alexandria.  If  its 
heart  of  aged  stone  could  feel  the  continuity  of  con- 
ditions, it  must  be  aware  of  the  essential  unity  of  the 
civilizations  beside  the  Nile  and  beside  the  Hudson; 
and,  if  Cleopatra's  Needle  had  really  an  eye  to  see,  it 
must  perceive  that  there  is  nothing  truly  civic  in  either. 
As  the  tide  of  dissatisfied  and  weary  wealth  rolls  by 
its  base  here,  in  the  fantastic  variety  of  its  equipages, 
does  the  needle  discern  so  much  difference  between 
their  occupants  and  the  occupants  of  the  chariots  that 
swept  beneath  it  in  the  capital  of  the  Ptolemies  two 
thousand  years  ago?  I  can  imagine  it  at  times  wink- 
ing such  an  eye  and  cocking  in  derision  the  gilded  cap 
with  which  the  New-Yorkers  have  lately  crowned  it. 
They  pass  it  in  all  kinds  of  vehicles,  and  there  are  all 
kinds  of  people  in  them,  though  there  are  sometimes 
no  people  at  all,  as  when  the  servants  have  been  sent 
out  to  exercise  the  horses,  for  nobody's  good  or  pleas- 
ure, and  in  the  spirit  of  that  atrocious  waste  which 
runs  through  our  whole  life.  I  have  now  and  then 
seen  a  gentleman  driving  a  four-in-hand,  with  every- 
thing to  minister  to  his  vanity  in  the  exact  imitation 
of  a  nobleman  driving  a  four-in-hand  over  English 

176 


GLIMPSES    OF    CENTRAL    PARK 

roads,  and  with  no  one  to  be  drawn  by  his  crop-tailed 
bays  or  blacks  except  himself  and  the  solemn  groom  on 
his  perch;  I  have  wondered  how  much  more  nearly 
equal  they  were  in  their  aspirations  and  instincts  than 
either  of  them  imagined.  A  gentleman  driving  a  pair, 
abreast  or  tandem,  with  a  groom  on  the  rumble,  for 
no  purpose  except  to  express  his  quality,  is  a  common 
sight  enough ;  and  sometimes  you  see  a  lady  illustrating 
her  consequence  in  like  manner.  A  lady  driving,  while 
a  gentleman  occupies  the  seat  behind  her,  is  a  sight 
which  always  affects  me  like  the  sight  of  a  man  taking 
a  woman's  arm  in  walking,  as  the  man  of  an  under- 
bred sort  is  apt  to  do. 

Horsy  -  looking  women,  who  are,  to  ladies  at  least, 
what  horsy  -  looking  men  are  to  gentlemen,  drive  to- 
gether ;  often  they  are  really  ladies,  and  sometimes  they 
are  nice  young  girls,  out  for  an  innocent  dash  and 
chat.  They  are  all  very  much  and  very  unimpressive- 
ly dressed,  whether  they  sit  in  state  behind  the  regula- 
tion coachman  and  footman  or  handle  the  reins  them- 
selves. Now  and  then  you  see  a  lady  with  a  dog  on 
the  seat  beside  her  for  an  airing,  but  not  often  a  child ; 
once  or  twice  I  have  seen  one  with  a  large  spaniel 
seated  comfortably  in  front  of  her,  and  I  have  asked 
myself  what  would  happen  if,  instead  of  the  dog,  she 
had  taken  into  her  carriage  some  pale  woman  or  weary 
old  man,  such  as  I  sometimes  see  gazing  patiently  after 
her.  But  the  thing  would  be  altogether  impossible.  I 
should  be  the  first  to  feel  the  want  of  keeping  in  it; 
for,  however  recent  wealth  may  be  here,  it  has  equipped 
itself  with  all  the  apparatus  of  long-inherited  riches, 
which  it  is  as  strongly  bound  to  maintain  intact  as  if 
it  were  really  old  and  hereditary — perhaps  more  strong- 
ly. I  must  say  that,  mostly,  its  owners  look  very  tired 
of  it,  or  of  something,  in  public,  and  that  our  Amer- 

177 


IMPKESSIONS    AND    EXPEKIENCES 

lean  plutocrats,  if  they  have  not  the  distinction  of  an 
aristocracy,  have  at  least  the  ennui. 


But  these  stylish  turnouts  form  only  a  part  of  the 
spectacle  in  the  Park  driveways,  though  they  form, 
perhaps,  the  larger  part.  Bicyclers  weave  their  dan- 
gerous and  devious  way  everywhere  through  the  roads, 
and  seem  to  be  forbidden  the  bridle-paths,  where  from 
point  to  point  you  catch  a  glimpse  of  the  riders.  There 
are  boys  and  girls  in  village  carts,  the  happiest  of  all 
the  people  you  see;  and  there  are  cheap-looking  bug- 
gies, like  those  you  meet  in  the  country,  with  each  a 
young  man  and  young  girl  in  them,  as  if  they  had 
come  in  from  some  remote  suburb;  turnouts  shabbier 
yet,  with  poor  old  horses,  poke  about  with  some  elder- 
ly pair,  like  a  farmer  and  his  wife.  There  are  fam- 
ily carryalls,  with  friendly-looking  families,  old  and 
young,  getting  the  good  of  the  Park  together  in  a 
long,  leisurely  jog;  and  open  buggies  with  yellow 
wheels  and  raffish  men  in  them  behind  their  widespread 
trotters;  or  with  some  sharp-faced  young  fellow  get- 
ting all  the  speed  out  of  a  lively  span  that  the  mounted 
policeman,  stationed  at  intervals  along  the  driveways, 
will  allow.  The  finer  vehicles  are  of  all  types,  pat- 
terned, like  everything  else  that  is  fine  in  America, 
upon  something  fine  in  Europe;  but  just  now  a  very 
high-backed  phaeton  appears  to  be  most  in  favor;  and, 
in  fact,  I  get  a  great  deal  of  pleasure  out  of  these 
myself,  as  I  do  not  have  to  sit  stiffly  up  in  them.  They 
make  me  think  somehow  of  those  eighteenth-century 
English  novels,  of  the  times  when  young  ladies  like 

Evelina  drove  out  in  phaetons  and  were  the  passionate 

178 


GLIMPSES    OF    CENTRAL    PARK 

pursuit  of  Lord  Orvilles  and  Sir  Clement  Willough- 
bys. 

How  far  do  the  New-Yorkers  publicly  carry  their 
travesty  of  the  European  aristocratic  life  ?  I  should 
say,  from  what  I  have  seen  of  the  driving  in  the  Park, 
it  does  not  err  on  the  side  of  excess.  The  equipages, 
when  they  are  fine,  are  rather  simple;  and  the  liveries 
are  such  as  express  a  proprietary  grandeur  in  coat-but- 
tons, silver  or  gilt,  and  in  a  darker  or  lighter  drab  of 
the  cloth  the  servants  wear;  they  are  often  in  brown 
or  dark  green.  Now  and  then  you  see  the  tightly 
cased  legs  and  top-boots  and  cockaded  hat  of  a  groom, 
but  this  is  of tenest  on  a  four  -  in  -  hand  coach  or  the 
rumble  of  a  tandem  cart;  the  soul  of  the  free-born 
republican  is  rarely  bowed  before  it  on  the  box  of  a 
family  carriage.  I  have  seen  nothing  like  an  attempt 
at  family  colors  in  the  trappings  of  the  coachman  and 
horses. 

I  should  say  that  the  imitation  was  quite  within  the 
bounds  of  good  taste.  The  bad  taste  is  in  the  wish 
to  imitate  Europe  at  all;  but,  with  the  abundance  of 
money,  the  imitation  is  simply  inevitable.  There  is 
no  American  life  for  wealth;  there  is  no  native  for- 
mula for  the  expression  of  social  superiority;  because 
America  means  equality,  if  it  means  anything,  in  the 
last  analysis.  But  in  all  this  show  on  the  Park  drive- 
ways you  get  no  effect  so  vivid  as  the  effect  of  sterility 
in  that  liberty  without  equality  which  seems  to  satisfy 
us  Americans.  A  man  may  come  into  the  Park  with 
any  sort  of  vehicle,  so  that  it  is  not  for  the  carriage 
of  merchandise,  and  he  is  free  to  spoil  what  might  be 
a  fine  effect  with  the  intrusion  of  whatever  squalor  of 
turnout  he  will.  He  has  as  much  right  there  as  any 
one,  but  the  right  to  be  shabby  in  the  presence  of  peo- 
ple who  are  fine  is  not  one  that  I  should  envy  him.  I 
13  179 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

do  not  think  that  he  can  be  comfortable  in  it,  for  the 
superiority  around  him  puts  him  to  shame,  as  it  puts 
the  poor  man  to  shame  at  every  turn  in  life,  though 
some  people,  with  an  impudence  that  is  pitiable,  will 
tell  you  that  it  does  not  put  him  to  shame;  that  he 
feels  himself  as  good  as  any  one.  We  are  always  talk- 
ing about  human  nature  and  what  it  is,  and  what  it  is 
not;  but  we  try  in  our  blind  worship  of  inequality  to 
refuse  the  first  and  simplest  knowledge  of  human  nat- 
ure, which  testifies  of  itself  in  every  throb  of  our  own 
hearts,  as  we  try  even  to  refuse  a  knowledge  of  the 
divine  nature,  and  attribute  to  the  Father  of  all  a  de- 
sign in  the  injustice  we  have  ourselves  created. 

To  me  the  lesson  of  Central  Park  is  that,  where  it  is 
used  in  the  spirit  of  fraternity  and  equality,  the  pleas- 
ure in  it  is  pure  and  fine,  and  that  its  frequenters  have 
for  the  moment  a  hint  of  the  beauty  which  might  be 
perpetually  in  their  lives;  but  where  it  is  invaded  by 
the  motives  of  the  strife  that  raves  all  round  it  in  the 
city  outside,  its  joys  are  fouled  with  contempt  and 
envy,  the  worst  passions  that  tear  the  human  heart. 
Ninety-nine  Americans  out  of  a  hundred  have  never 
seen  a  man  in  livery ;  they'have  never  dreamed  of  such 
a  display  as  this  in  the  Park.  Yet,  with  our  conditions, 
I  fear  that  at  sight  of  it  ninety-nine  Americans  out 
of  every  hundred  would  lust  for  their  turn  of  the 
wheel,  their  throw  of  the  dice,  so  that  they  might  suc- 
ceed to  a  place  in  it,  and  flaunt  their  luxury  in  the 
face  of  poverty  and  abash  humility  with  their  pride. 


NEW   YOKE   STREETS 

IF  the  reader  will  look  at  a  plan  of  New  York,  he 
will  see  that  Central  Park  is  really  in  the  centre  of  the 
place,  if  a  thing  which  has  length  only,  or  is  so  nearly 
without  breadth  or  thickness,  can  be  said  to  have  a 
centre.  South  of  the  Park  the  whole  island  is  dense 
with  life  and  business ;  it  is  pretty  solidly  built  up  on 
either  side;  but  to  the  northward  the  blocks  of  houses 
are  no  longer  of  a  compact  succession;  they  struggle 
up,  at  irregular  intervals,  from  open  fields,  and  sink 
again  on  the  streets  pushed  beyond  them  into  the 
simple  country,  where  even  a  suburban  character  is 
lost.  It  can  only  be  a  few  years,  at  most,  before  all 
the  empty  spaces  will  be  occupied,  and  the  town,  such 
as  it  is,  and  such  as  it  seems  to  have  been  ever  since 
the  colonial  period,  will  have  anchored  itself  fast  in 
the  rock  that  underlies  the  larger  half  of  it  and  im- 
parted its  peculiar  effect  to  every  street — an  effect  of 
arrogant  untidiness,  of  superficial  and  formal  gentility, 
of  immediate  neglect  and  overuse. 


You  will  see  more  of  the  neglect  and  overuse  in  the 
avenues  which  penetrate  the  city's  mass  from  north  to 
south,  and  more  of  the  superficial  and  formal  gentility 
in  the  streets  that  cross  these  avenues  from  east  to 

181 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

west;  but  the  arrogant  untidiness  you  will  find  nearly 
everywhere,  except  in  some  of  the  newest  quarters 
westward  from  the  Park  and  still  farther  up  -  town. 
These  are  really  very  clean ;  but  they  have  a  bare  look, 
as  if  they  were  not  yet  inhabited,  and,  in  fact,  many 
of  the  houses  are  still  empty.  Lower  down,  the  streets 
are  often  as  shabby  and  as  squalid  as  the  avenues  that 
run  parallel  with  the  river-sides;  and  at  least  two  of 
the  avenues  are  as  decent  as  the  decentest  cross-streets. 

Of  late,  a  good  many  streets  and  several  avenues 
have  been  asphalted,  and  the  din  of  wheels  on  the 
rough  pavement  no  longer  torments  the  ear  so  cruelly; 
but  there  is  still  the  sharp  clatter  of  the  horses'  shoes 
everywhere ;  and  their  pulverized  manure,  which  forms 
so  great  a  part  of  the  city's  dust,  and  is  constantly 
taken  into  people's  stomachs  and  lungs,  seems  to  blow 
more  freely  about  on  the  asphalt  than  on  the  old-fash- 
ioned pavements.  A  few  years  ago  scraps  of  paper, 
straw,  fruit-peel,  and  all  manner  of  minor  waste  and 
rubbish  littered  all  the  thoroughfares;  under  a  re- 
form administration  this  has  been  amended;  but  no 
one  knows  how  long  a  reform  will  last  in  New  York. 

When  I  leave  Central  Park,  where  I  like  best  to 
walk,  I  usually  take  one  of  the  avenues  southward,  and 
then  turn  eastward  or  westward  on  one  of  the  cross- 
streets  whose  perspective  appeals  to  my  curiosity,  and 
stroll  through  it  to  one  of  the  rivers.  The  avenues 
are  fifteen  or  sixteen  in  number,  and  they  stretch,  some 
farther  than  others,  up  and  down  the  island,  but  most 
of  them  end  in  the  old  town,  where  its  irregularity  be- 
gins, at  the  south,  and  several  are  interrupted  by  the 
different  parks  at  the  north.  Together  with  the  streets 
that  intersect  them  between  the  old  town  and  Central 
Park,  they  form  one  of  the  most  characteristic  parts 
of  modern  "New  York.  Like  the  streets,  they  are  num- 

182 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

bered,  rather  than  named,  from  a  want  of  imagination, 
or  from  a  preference  of  mere  convenience  to  the  poetry 
and  associations  that  cluster  about  a  name,  and  can 
never  cling  to  a  number,  or  from  a  business  impatience 
to  be  quickly  done  with  the  matter.  This  must  rather 
defeat  itself,  however,  when  a  hurried  man  undertakes 
to  tell  you  that  he  lives  at  three  hundred  and  seventy- 
five  on  One  Hundred  and  Fifty-seventh  Street.  Tow- 
ard the  rivers  the  avenues  grow  shabbier  and  shabbier, 
though  this  statement  must  be  qualified,  like  all  gen- 
eral statements.  Seventh  Avenue,  on  the  west,  is  pleas- 
anter  than  Sixth  Avenue;  and  Second  Avenue,  on  the 
east,  is  more  agreeable  than  Third  Avenue.  In  fact, 
the  other  afternoon,  as  I  strayed  over  to  the  East  River, 
I  found  several  blocks  of  Avenue  A,  which  runs  near- 
est it,  very  quiet,  built  up  with  comfortable  dwellings, 
and  even  clean,  as  cleanliness  is  understood  in  New 
York. 

But  it  is  Fifth  Avenue  which  divides  the  city  length- 
wise nearest  the  middle,  and  it  is  this  avenue  which 
affords  the  norm  of  style  and  comfort  to  the  other 
avenues  on  either  hand,  and  to  all  the  streets  that  in- 
tersect it.  Madison  Avenue  is  its  rival,  and  has  suf- 
fered less  from  the  invasion  of  shops  and  hotels,  but  a 
long  stretch  of  Fifth  Avenue  is  still  the  most  aristo- 
cratic quarter  of  the  city,  and  is  upon  the  whole  its 
finest  thoroughfare.  I  do  not  think  any  New  York 
street  fine ;  but,  generally,  Fifth  Avenue  and  the  cross- 
streets  in  its  better  part  have  a  certain  regularity  in 
their  mansions  of  brown-stone  which  give  something 
of  the  pleasure  one  gets  from  symmetry.  They  are  at 
least  not  so  chaotic  as  they  might  be;  though  they  al- 
ways suggest  money  more  than  taste,  I  cannot  at  cer- 
tain moments,  and  under  the  favor  of  an  evening  sky, 
deny  them  a  sort  of  unlovely  and  forbidding  beauty. 

183 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

There  are  not  many  of  these  cross-streets  which  have 
remained  intact  from  the  business  of  the  other  avenues. 
They  have  always  a  drinking-saloon  or  a  provision- 
store  or  an  apothecary's  shop  at  the  corners  where  they 
intersect;  the  modistes  find  lodgment  in  them  almost 
before  the  residents  are  aware.  Beyond  Sixth  Avenue, 
or  Seventh  at  farthest,  on  the  west,  and  Fourth  Ave- 
nue or  Lexington,  on  the  east,  they  lose  their  genteel 
character;  their  dwellings  degenerate  into  apartment- 
houses,  and  then  into  tenement-houses  of  lower  and 
lower  grade  till  the  rude  traffic  and  the  offensive  in- 
dustries of  the  river  shores  are  reached. 

But  once  more  I  must  hedge,  for  sometimes  a  street 
is  respectable  almost  to  the  water  on  one  side  or  the 
other;  and  there  are  whole  neighborhoods  of  pleasant 
dwellings,  far  down-town,  which  seem  to  have  been 
forgotten  by  the  enterprise  of  business,  or  neglected 
by  its  caprice,  and  to  have  escaped  for  a  time  at  least 
the  contagion  of  poverty.  Business  and  poverty  are 
everywhere  slowly  or  swiftly  eating  their  way  into  the 
haunts  of  respectability  and  destroying  its  pleasant 
homes.  They  already  have  the  whole  of  the  old  town 
to  themselves.  In  large  spaces  of  it  no  one  dwells 
but  the  janitors  with  their  families,  who  keep  the  sky- 
scraping  edifices  where  business  frets  the  time  away; 
and  by  night  in  the  streets  where  myriads  throng  by 
day  no  one  walks  but  the  outcast  and  the  watch. 

Many  of  these  business  streets  are  the  handsomest 
in  the  city,  with  a  good  sky-line  and  an  architectural 
ideal  too  good  for  the  uses  of  commerce.  This  is  often 
realized  in  antipathetic  iron,  but  often  there  is  good 
honest  work  in  stone,  and  an  effect  better  than  the  best 
of  Fifth  Avenue.  But  this  is  stupid  and  wasteful; 
it  is  for  the  pleasure  of  no  one's  taste  or  sense;  the 

business  men  who  traffic  in  these  edifices  have  no  time 

184 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

for  their  beauty,  or  no  perception  of  it;  the  porters 
and  truckmen  and  expressmen,  who  toil  and  moil  in 
these  thoroughfares,  have  no  use  for  the  grandeur  that 
catches  the  eye  of  a  chance  passer. 

Other  spaces  are  abandoned  to  the  poverty  which 
festers  in  the  squalid  houses  and  swarms  day  and  night 
in  the  squalid  streets;  but  business  presses  closer  and 
harder  upon  the  refuges  of  its  foster-child,  not  to  say 
its  offspring,  and  it  is  only  a  question  of  time  before 
it  shall  wholly  possess  them.  It  is  only  a  question  of 
time  before  all  the  comfortable  quarters  of  the  city, 
northward  from  the  old  town  to  the  Park,  shall  be  in- 
vaded, and  the  people  driven  to  the  streets  building 
up  on  the  west  and  east  of  it  for  a  little  longer  so- 
journ. Where  their  last  stay  shall  be,  Heaven  knows; 
perhaps  they  will  be  forced  into  the  country. 

In  this  sort  of  invasion,  however,  it  is  poverty  that 
seems  mostly  to  come  first,  and  it  is  business  that  fol- 
lows and  holds  the  conquest,  though  this  is  far  from 
being  always  the  case.  Whether  it  is  so  or  not,  how- 
ever, poverty  is  certain  at  some  time  to  impart  its 
taint;  for  it  is  perpetual  here,  from  generation  to  gen- 
eration, like  death  itself.  In  our  conditions,  poverty 
is  incurable ;  the  very  hope  of  cure  is  laughed  to  scorn 
by  those  who  cling  the  closest  to  these  conditions;  it 
may  be  better  at  one  time  and  worse  at  another;  but 
it  must  always  be,  somehow,  till  time  shall  be  no  more. 
It  is  from  everlasting  to  everlasting. 


II 


When  I  come  home  from  these  walks  of  mine,  I 
have  a  vision  of  the  wretched  quarters  through  which 
I  have  passed,  as  blotches  of  disease  upon  the  civic 

185 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

body,  as  loathsome  sores,  destined  to  eat  deeper  arid 
deeper  into  it;  and  I  am  haunted  by  this  sense  of 
them,  until  I  plunge  deep  into  the  Park,  and  wash  my 
consciousness  clean  of  it  all  for  a  while.  But  when  I 
am  actually  in  these  leprous  spots  I  become  hardened, 
for  the  moment,  to  the  deeply  underlying  fact  of  hu- 
man discomfort.  I  feel  their  picturesqueness,  with  a 
callous  indifference  to  that  ruin,  or  that  defect,  which 
must  so  largely  constitute  the  charm  of  the  picturesque. 
A  street  of  tenement-houses  is  always  more  picturesque 
than  a  street  of  brown-stone  residences,  which  the  same 
thoroughfare  usually  is  before  it  slopes  to  either  river. 
The  fronts  of  the  edifices  are  decorated  with  the  iron 
balconies  and  ladders  of  the  fire-escapes,  and  have  in 
the  perspective  a  false  air  of  gayety,  which  is  traves- 
tied in  their  rear  by  the  lines  thickly  woven  from  the 
windows  to  the  tall  poles  set  between  the  backs  of 
the  houses  and  fluttering  with  drying  clothes  as  with 
banners. 

The  sidewalks  swarm  with  children,  and  the  air 
rings  with  their  clamor,  as  they  fly  back  and  forth  at 
play;  on  the  thresholds,  the  mothers  sit  nursing  their 
babes  and  the  old  women  gossip  together;  young  girls 
lean  from  the  casements,  alow  and  aloft,  or  flirt  from 
the  doorways  with  the  hucksters  who  leave  their  carts 
in  the  street,  while  they  come  forward  with  some  bar- 
gain in  fruit  or  vegetables  and  then  resume  their  leis- 
urely progress  and  their  jarring  cries.  The  place  has 
all  the  attraction  of  close  neighborhood,  which  the  poor 
love,  and  which  affords  them  for  nothing  the  spectacle 
of  the  human  drama,  with  themselves  for  actors.  In 
a  picture  it  would  be  most  pleasingly  effective,  for  then 
you  could  be  in  it,  and  yet  have  the  distance  on  it 
which  it  needs.  But  to  be  in  it,  and  not  have  the  dis- 
tance, is  to  inhale  the  stenches  of  the  neglected  street, 

186 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

and  to  catch  that  yet  fouler  and  dreadfuller  poverty- 
smell  which  breathes  from  the  open  doorways.  It  is 
to  see  the  children  quarrelling  in  their  games,  and 
beating  one  another  in  the  face,  and  rolling  one  another 
in  the  gutter,  like  the  little  savage  outlaws  they  are. 
It  is  to  see  the  work-worn  look  of  the  mothers,  the 
squalor  of  the  babes,  the  haggish  ugliness  of  the  old 
women,  the  slovenly  f  rowziness  of  the  young  girls.  All 
this  makes  you  hasten  your  pace  down  to  the  river, 
where  the  tall  buildings  break  and  dwindle  into  stables 
and  shanties  of  wood,  and  finally  end  in  the  piers,  com- 
manding the  whole  stretch  of  the  mighty  waterway  with 
its  shipping  and  the  wooded  heights  of  its  western  bank. 
I  am  supposing  you  to  have  walked  down  a  street 
of  tenement-houses  to  the  North  River,  as  the  New- 
Yorkers  call  the  Hudson;  and  I  wish  I  could  give 
some  notion  of  the  beauty  and  majesty  of  the  stream, 
some  sense  of  the  mean  and  ignoble  effect  of  the  city's 
invasion  of  the  hither  shore.  The  ugliness  is,  indeed, 
only  worse  in  degree,  but  not  in  kind,  than  that  of  all 
city  water  -  fronts.  Instead  of  pleasant  homes,  with 
green  lawns  and  orchards  sloping  to  the  brink,  huge 
factories  and  foundries,  lumber-yards,  breweries, 
slaughter-houses,  and  warehouses,  abruptly  inter- 
spersed with  stables  and  hovels  and  drinking-saloons, 
disfigure  the  shore,  and  in  the  nearest  avenue  the 
freight  -  trains  come  and  go  on  lines  of  railroads,  in 
all  the  middle  portion  of  New  York.  South  of  it,  in 
the  business  section,  the  poverty  section,  the  river  re- 
gion is  a  mere  chaos  of  individual  and  commercial 
strife  and  pauper  wretchedness.  North  of  it  there  are 
gardened  driveways  following  the  shore;  and  even  at 
many  points  between,  when  you  finally  reach  the 
river,  there  is  a  kind  of  peace,  or  at  least  a  truce  to 
the  frantic  activities  of  business.  To  be  sure,  the 

187 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

heavy  trucks  grind  up  and  down  the  long  piers,  but 
on  either  side  the  docks  are  full  of  leisurely  canal- 
boats,  and  if  you  could  come  with  me  in  the  late  after- 
noon, you  would  see  the  smoke  curling  upward  from 
their  cabin  roofs,  as  from  the  chimneys  of  so  many 
rustic  cottages,  and  smell  the  evening  meal  cooking 
within,  while  the  canal-wives  lounged  at  the  gangway 
hatches  for  a  breath  of  the  sunset  air,  and  the  boat- 
men smoked  on  the  gunwales  or  indolently  plied  the 
long  sweeps  of  their  pumps.  All  the  hurry  and  turmoil 
of  the  city  is  lost  among  these  people,  whose  clumsy 
craft  recall  the  grassy  inland  levels  remote  from  the 
metropolis  and  the  slow  movement  of  life  in  the  quiet 
country  ways.  Some  of  the  mothers  from  the  tene- 
ment-houses stroll  down  on  the  piers  with  their  babies 
in  their  arms,  and  watch  their  men-kind,  of  all  ages, 
fishing  along  the  sides  of  the  dock,  or  casting  their  lines 
far  out  into  the  current  at  the  end.  They  do  not  seem 
to  catch  many  fish,  and  never  large  ones,  but  they  si- 
lently enjoy  the  sport,  which  they  probably  find  leisure 
for  in  the  general  want  of  work  in  these  hard  times; 
if  they  swear  a  little  at  their  luck,  now  and  then,  it 
is,  perhaps,  no  more  than  their  luck  deserves.  Some 
do  not  even  fish,  but  sit  with  their  legs  dangling  over 
the  water  and  watch  the  swift  tugs  or  the  lagging 
sloops  that  pass,  with  now  and  then  a  larger  sail  or 
a  towering  passenger-steamboat.  Far  down  the  stream 
they  can  see  the  forests  of  masts  fringing  either  shore 
and  following  the  point  of  the  island  round  and  up 
into  the  great  channel  called  the  East  River.  These 
vessels  seem  as  multitudinous  as  the  houses  that  spread 
everywhere  from  them  over  the  shore  farther  than  the 
eye  can  reach.  They  bring  the  commerce  of  the  world 
to  this  mighty  city,  which,  with  all  its  riches,  is  the 

parent  of  such  misery,  and  with  all  its  traffic  abounds 

188 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

in  idle  men  who  cannot  find  work.  The  ships  look 
happy  and  free,  in  the  stream,  but  they  are  of  the 
overworked  world,  too,  as  well  as  the  houses;  and,  let 
them  spread  their  wings  ever  so  widely,  they  still  bear 
with  them  the  sorrows  of  the  poor. 


Ill 


The  other  evening  I  walked  over  to  the  East  River 
through  one  of  the  tenement  streets,  and  I  reached  the 
water-side  just  as  the  soft  night  was  beginning  to  fall 
in  all  its  autumnal  beauty.  The  afterglow  died  from 
the  river,  while  I  hung  upon  a  parapet  over  a  gulf  ra- 
vined  out  of  the  bank  for  a  street,  and  experienced 
that  artistic  delight  which  cultivated  people  are  often 
proud  of  feeling,  in  the  aspect  of  the  long  prison  island 
which  breaks  the  expanse  of  the  channel.  I  knew  the 
buildings  on  it  were  prisons,  and  that  the  men  and 
women  in  them,  bad  before,  could  only  come  out  of 
them  worse  than  before  and  doomed  to  a  life  of  out- 
lawry and  of  crime.  I  was  aware  that  they  were  each 
an  image  of  that  loveless  and  hopeless  perdition  which 
men  once  imagined  that  God  had  prepared  for  the 
souls  of  the  damned,  but  I  could  not  see  the  barred 
windows  of  those  hells  in  the  waning  light.  I  could 
only  see  the  trees  along  their  walks,  their  dim  lawns 
and  gardens,  and  the  castellated  forms  of  the  prisons; 
and  the  aesthetic  sense,  which  is  careful  to  keep  itself 
pure  from  pity,  was  tickled  with  an  agreeable  impres- 
sion of  something  old  and  fair.  The  dusk  thickened, 
and  the  vast  steamboats  which  ply  between  the  city  and 
the  'New  England  ports  on  Long  Island  Sound,  and 
daily  convey  whole  populations  of  passengers  between 
New  York  and  Boston,  began  to  sweep  by  silently, 

189 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

swiftly,  luminous  masses  on  the  black  water.  Their 
lights  aloft  at  bow  and  stern,  floated  with  them  like 
lambent  planets;  the  lights  of  lesser  craft  dipped  by, 
and  came  and  went  in  the  distance;  the  lamps  of  the 
nearer  and  farther  shores  twinkled  into  sight,  and  a 
peace  that  ignored  all  the  misery  of  it,  fell  upon  the 
scene. 


IV 


The  greatest  problem  of  this  metropolis  is  not  how 
best  to  be  in  this  place  or  that,  but  how  fastest  to  go 
from  one  to  the  other,  and  the  New-Yorkers  have  made 
guesses  at  the  riddle,  bad  and  worse,  on  each  of  the 
avenues,  which,  in  their  character  of  mere  roadways, 
look  as  if  the  different  car -tracks  had  been  in  them 
first,  and  the  buildings,  high  and  low,  had  chanced 
along  their  sides  afterward.  This  is  not  the  fact,  of 
course,  and  it  is  not  so  much  the  effect  on  Fifth 
Avenue  and  Madison  Avenue  and  Lexington  Avenue, 
which  are  streets  of  dwellings,  solidly  built  up,  like 
the  cross-streets.  But  it  is  undoubtedly  the  effect  on 
all  the  other  avenues,  in  great  part  of  their  extent. 
They  vary  but  little  in  appearance  otherwise,  from  east 
to  west,  except  so  far  as  the  elevated  railroads  disfigure 
them,  if  thoroughfares  so  shabby  and  repulsive  as  they 
mostly  are,  can  be  said  to  be  disfigured,  and  not  beau- 
tified by  whatever  can  be  done  to  hide  any  part  of  their 
ugliness.  Where  this  is  left  to  make  its  full  impres- 
sion upon  the  spectators,  there  are  lines  of  horse-cars 
perpetually  jingling  up  and  down,  except  on  Fifth 
Avenue,  where  they  have  stages,  as  the  New-Yorkers 
call  the  unwieldy  and  unsightly  vehicles  that  ply 
there,  and  Lexington  Avenue,  where  they  have  the 
cable -cars.  But  the  horse-cars  run  even  under  the 

190 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

elevated  tracks,  and  no  experience  of  noise  can  enable 
you  to  conceive  of  the  furious  din  that  bursts  upon 
the  sense  when  at  some  corner  two  cars  encounter  on 
the  parallel  tracks  below,  while  two  trains  roar  and 
shriek  and  hiss  on  the  rails  overhead,  and  a  turmoil 
of  rattling  express-wagons,  heavy  drays  and  trucks, 
and  carts,  hacks,  carriages,  and  huge  vans  rolls  itself 
between  and  beneath  the  prime  agents  of  the  uproar. 
The  noise  is  not  only  deafening,  it  is  bewildering ;  you 
cannot  know  which  side  the  danger  threatens  most, 
and  you  literally  take  your  life  in  your  hands  when  you 
cross  in  the  midst  of  it.  Broadway,  which  traverses 
the  district  I  am  thinking  of  in  a  diagonal  line  till  it 
loses  its  distinctive  character  beyond  the  Park,  is  the 
course  of  the  cable-cars  running  with  a  silent  speed  that 
is  more  dangerous  even  than  the  tumultuous  rush  on  the 
avenues.  Now  and  then  the  apparatus  for  gripping  the 
chain  will  not  release  it,  and  then  the  car  rushes  wildly 
over  the  track,  running  amuck  through  everything  in 
its  way,  and  spreading  terror  on  every  hand.  When 
under  control  the  long  saloons  advance  swiftly,  from 
either  direction,  at  intervals  of  half  a  minute,  with  a 
monotonous  alarum  of  their  gongs,  and  the  foot-pas- 
senger has  to  look  well  to  his  way  if  he  ventures  across 
the  track,  lest  in  avoiding  one  car  another  roll  him  un- 
der its  wheels. 

Apparently,  the  danger  is  giiarded  as  well  as  it  can 
be,  and  it  has  simply  to  be  taken  into  the  account  of 
life  in  New  York,  for  it  cannot  be  abated,  and  no  one 
is  to  be  blamed  for  what  is  the  fault  of  every  one.  It 
is  true  that  there  ought  not,  perhaps,  to  be  any  track 
in  such  a  thoroughfare,  but  it  would  be  hard  to  prove 
that  people  could  get  on  without  it,  as  they  did  before 
the  theft  of  the  street  for  the  original  horse-car  track. 
Perhaps  it  was  not  a  theft;  but  at  all  events,  and  at 

191 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

the  best,  the  street  was  given  away  by  the  city  to  an 
adventurer  who  wished  to  lay  the  tracks  in  it  for  his 
private  gain,  and  none  of  the  property  owners  along 
the  line  could  help  themselves.  There  is  nothing  that 
Americans  hold  so  dear,  or  count  so  sacred,  as  private 
property;  life  and  limb  are  cheap  in  comparison;  but 
private  enterprise  is  allowed  to  violate  the  rights  of 
private  property,  from  time  to  time  here,  in  the  most 
dramatic  way. 

The  street  -  car  company  which  took  possession  of 
Broadway  never  paid  the  abutters  anything,  I  believe; 
and  the  elevated  railroad  companies  are  still  resisting 
payment  of  damages  on  the  four  avenues  which  they 
occupied  for  their  way  up  and  down  the  city  without 
offering  compensation  to  the  property  owners  along 
their  route.  If  the  community  had  built  these  roads, 
it  would  have  indemnified  every  one,  for  the  commu- 
nity is  always  just  when  it  is  the  expression  of  the 
common  honesty ;  and  if  it  is  ever  unjust,  it  is  because 
the  uncommon  dishonesty  has  contrived  to  corrupt  it. 

The  elevated  roads  and  the  cable  road  had  no  right 
to  be,  on  the  terms  that  the  New-Yorkers  have  them, 
but  they  are  by  far  the  best  means  of  transit  in  the 
city,  and  I  must  say  that,  if  they  were  not  abuses, 
they  would  offer  great  comfort  and  great  facility  to  the 
public.  This  is  especially  true  of  the  elevated  roads, 
which,  when  you  can  put  their  moral  offence  out  of  your 
mind,  are  always  delightful  in  their  ease  and  airy  swift- 
ness. You  fly  smoothly  along  between  the  second  and 
third  story  windows  of  the  houses,  which  are  shops 
below  and  dwellings  above,  on  the  avenues.  The  sta- 
tions, though  they  have  the  prevailing  effect  of  over- 
use and  look  dirty  and  unkempt,  are  rather  pretty  in 
themselves;  and  you  reach  them,  at  frequent  intervals, 

by  flights  of  not  ungraceful  iron  steps.     The  elevated 

192 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

roads  are  always  picturesque,  with  here  and  there  a 
sweeping  curve  that  might  almost  be  called  beautiful. 

They  darken  the  avenues,  of  course,  and  fill  them 
with  an  abominable  uproar.  Yet  traffic  goes  on  under- 
neath, and  life  goes  on  alongside  and  overhead,  and 
the  city  has  adjusted  itself  to  them,  as  a  man  adjusts 
himself  to  a  chronic  disease.  I  do  not  know  whether 
they  add  to  the  foulness  of  the  streets  they  pass  through 
or  not;  I  hardly  think  they  do.  The  mud  lies  longer, 
after  a  rain,  in  the  interminable  tunnels  which  they  form 
over  the  horse-car  tracks  in  4he  middle  of  the  avenues, 
and  which  you  can  look  through  for  miles ;  but  the  mud 
does  not  blow  into  your  nose  and  mouth  as  the  dust  does, 
and  that  is,  so  far,  a  positive  advantage.  A  negative  ad- 
vantage, which  I  have  hinted,  is  that  they  hide  so  much 
of  the  street  from  sight,  and  keep  you  from  seeing  all 
its  shabbiness,  pitilessly  open  to  the  eyes  in  the  avenues 
which  have  only  horse-car  tracks  in  them.  In  fact, 
now  that  the  elevated  railroads  are  built,  and  the  wrong 
they  have  done  to  persons  is  mainly  past  recall,  per- 
haps the  worst  that  can  be  said  of  them  is  that  they  do 
not  serve  their  purpose.  Of  course,  in  our  conditions, 
where  ten  men  are  always  doing  the  work  of  one  man 
in  rivalry  with  one  another,  the  passage  of  people  to 
and  from  business  is  enormous — the  passage  of  men  to 
get  money  and  the  passage  of  women  to  spend  it;  and 
at  the  hours  of  the  morning  and  the  afternoon  when 
the  volume  of  travel  is  the  greatest  the  trains  of  the 
elevated  roads  offer  a  spectacle  that  is  really  incredible. 

Every  seat  in  them  is  taken,  and  every  foot  of  space 
in  the  aisles  between  the  seats  is  held  by  people  stand- 
ing and  swaying  miserably  to  and  fro  by  the  leather 
straps  dangling  from  the  roofs.  Men  and  women  are 
indecently  crushed  together,  without  regard  for  that 
personal  dignity  which  we  seem  to  know  nothing  of 

193 


IMPEESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

and  care  nothing  for.  The  multitude  overflows  from 
the  car,  at  either  end,  and  the  passengers  are  as  tight- 
ly wedged  on  the  platform  without  as  they  are  within. 
The  long  trains  follow  one  another  at  intervals  of  two 
or  three  minutes,  and  at  each  station  they  make  a  stop 
of  but  a  few  seconds,  when  those  who  wish  to  alight 
fight  their  way  through  the  struggling  mass.  Those 
who  wish  to  mount  fight  their  way  into  the  car  or  on 
to  the  platform,  where  the  guard  slams  an  iron  gate 
against  the  stomachs  and  in  the  faces  of  those  arriving 
too  late.  Sometimes  horrible  accidents  happen ;  a  man 
clinging  to  the  outside  of  the  gate  has  the  life  crushed 
out  of  his  body  against  the  posts  of  the  station  as  the 
train  pulls  out.  But  in  this  land,  where  people  have 
such  a  dread  of  civic  collectivism  of  any  kind,  lest  in- 
dividuality should  suffer,  the  individual  is  practically 
nothing  in  the  regard  of  the  corporate  collectivities 
which  abound. 


It  is  not  only  the  corporations  which  outrage  per- 
sonal rights ;  where  there  is  a  question  of  interest, 
there  seems  to  be  no  question  of  rights  between  in- 
dividuals. They  prey  upon  one  another  and  seize  ad- 
vantages by  force  and  by  fraud  in  too  many  ways  for 
me  to  hope  to  make  the  whole  situation  evident.  The 
avenues  to  the  eastward  and  westward  have  not  grown 
up  solidly  and  continuously  in  obedience  to  any  law 
of  order  or  in  pursuance  of  any  meditated  design. 
They  have  been  pushed  along  given  lines,  in  frag- 
ments, as  builders  saw  their  interest  in  offering  buyers 
a  house  or  a  row  of  houses,  or  as  they  could  glut  or 
trick  the  greed  of  land-owners  clinging  to  their  land, 
and  counting  upon  some  need  of  it,  in  the  hope  of 

194 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

extorting  an  unearned  profit  from  it.  In  one  place 
you  will  see  a  vast  and  lofty  edifice,  of  brick  or  stone, 
and  on  each  side  of  it  or  in  front  of  it  a  structure  one- 
fourth  as  high,  or  a  row  of  scurvy  hovels,  left  there 
till  a  purchaser  comes,  not  to  pay  the  honest  worth  of 
the  land  for  it,  but  to  yield  the  price  the  owner  wants. 
In  other  places  you  see  long  stretches  of  high  board 
fence,  shutting  in  vacant  lots,  often  the  best  lots  on 
the  street,  which  the  landlord  holds  for  the  rise  des- 
tined to  accrue  to  him  from  the  building  all  round  and 
beyond  his  property.  In  the  mean  time  he  pays  a  low 
tax  on  his  land  compared  with  the  tax  which  the  im- 
proved property  pays,  and  gets  some  meagre  return 
for  the  use  of  his  fence  by  the  Italian  fruiterers  who 
build  their  stalls  into  it,  and  by  the  bill-posters  who 
cover  it  with  a  medley  of  theatrical  announcements, 
picturing  the  scenes  of  the  different  plays  and  the  per- 
sons of  the  players.  There  are  many  things  which 
unite  to  render  the  avenues  unseemly  and  unsightly, 
such  as  the  apparently  desperate  tastelessness  and  the 
apparently  instinctive  uncleanliness  of  the  New-York- 
ers. But  as  I  stand  at  some  point  commanding  a  long 
stretch  of  one  of  their  tiresome  perspectives,  which  is 
architecturally  like  nothing  so  much  as  a  horse's  jaw- 
bone, with  the  teeth  broken  or  dislodged  at  intervals, 
I  can  blame  nothing  so  much  for  the  hideous  effect  as 
the  rapacity  of  the  land-owner  holding  on  for  a  rise, 
as  it  is  called.  It  is  he  who  most  spoils  the  sky-line, 
and  keeps  the  street,  mean  and  poor  at  the  best  in  de- 
sign, a  defeated  purpose  and  a  chaos  come  again. 

Even  when  the  owners  begin  to  build,  to  improve 
their  real  estate,  as  the  phrase  is,  it  is  without  regard 
to  the  rights  of  their  neighbors  or  the  feelings  or 
tastes  of  the  public,  so  far  as  the  public  may  be  sup- 
posed to  have  any.  This  is  not  true  of  the  shabbier 
14  195 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

avenues  alone,  but  of  the  finest,  and  of  all  the  streets. 
If  you  will  look,  for  instance,  at  the  street  facing  the 
southern  limit  of  the  Park,  you  will  get  some  notion 
of  what  I  mean,  and  I  hope  you  will  be  willing  to  suf- 
fer by  a  little  study  of  it.  At  the  western  end  you 
will  see  a  vacant  lot,  with  its  high  board  fence  covered 
with  painted  signs;  then  a  tall  mass  of  apartment- 
houses  ;  then  a  stretch  of  ordinary  "New  York  dwellings 
of  the  old,  commonplace  brown-stone  sort ;  then  a  stable, 
and  a  wooden  liquor  saloon  at  the  corner.  Across  the 
next  avenue  there  rises  far  aloof  the  compact  bulk  of 
a  series  of  apartment-houses,  which  in  color  and  de- 
sign are  the  pleasantest  in  the  city,  and  are  so  far 
worthy  of  their  site.  Beyond  them  to  the  eastward 
the  buildings  decline  and  fall,  till  they  sink  into  an- 
other two-story  drinking-shop  on  the  corner  of  another 
avenue,  where  you  will  see  the  terminus  of  one  of  the 
elevated  roads.  Beyond  this  avenue  is  the  fence  of  a 
large  vacant  lot,  covered,  as  usual,  with  theatrical  post- 
ers, and  then  there  surges  skyward  another  series  of 
apartment-houses.  The  highest  of  these  is  nearly  fifty 
feet  higher  than  its  nearest  neighbors,  which  sink  again 
till  you  suddenly  drop  from  their  nondescript  monotony 
to  the  Gothic  fagade  of  a  house  of  a  wholly  different 
color,  in  its  pale  sandstone,  from  the  red  of  their  brick 
fronts. 

A  vacant  lot  yawns  here  again,  with  a  flare  of  the- 
atrical posters  on  its  fence,  and  beyond  this,  on  the 
corner,  is  a  huge  hotel,  the  most  agreeable  of  the  three 
that  tower  above  the  fine  square  at  the  gate  of  the 
Park.  With  our  silly  American  weakness  for  some- 
thing foreign,  this  square  is  called  the  Plaza ;  I  believe 
it  is  not  at  all  like  a  Spanish  plaza,  but  the  name  is  its 
least  offence.  An  irregular  space  in  the  centre  is  plant- 
ed with  trees,  in  whose  shade  the  broken-kneed  hacks 

196 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

of  the  public  carriages  droop  their  unhappy  heads, 
without  the  spirit  to  bite  the  flies  that  trouble  their 
dreams;  and  below  this  you  get  a  glimpse  of  the  con- 
ventional cross-street  terminating  the  Plaza.  At  the 
eastern  corner  of  the  avenue  is  a  costly  new  apartment- 
house  of  a  modified  Gothic  style,  and  then  you  come 
to  the  second  of  the  great  hotels  which  give  the  Plaza 
such  character  as  it  has.  It  is  of  a  light-colored  stone, 
and  it  towers  far  above  the  first,  which  is  of  brick. 
It  is  thirteen  stories  high,  and  it  stops  abruptly  in  a 
flat  roof.  On  the  next  corner  north  is  another  hotel, 
which  rises  six  or  seven  stories  higher  yet,  and  ter- 
minates in  a  sort  of  mansard,  topping  a  romanesque 
cliff  of  yellow  brick  and  red  sandstone.  I  seek  a  term 
for  the  architectural  order,  but  it  may  not  be  the  right 
one.  There  is  no  term  for  the  disorder  of  what  suc- 
ceeds. From  the  summit  of  this  enormous  acclivity 
there  is  a  precipitous  fall  of  twelve  stories  to  the  roof 
of  the  next  edifice,  which  is  a  grocery;  and  then  to 
the  florist's  and  photographer's  next  is  another  descent 
of  three  stories ;  on  the  corner  is  a  drinking-saloon,  one 
story  in  height,  with  a  brick  front  and  a  wooden  side. 
I  will  not  ask  you  to  go  farther  with  me;  the  avenue 
continues  northward  and  southward  in  a  delirium  of 
lines  and  colors — a  savage  anarchy  of  shapes  which  I 
should  think  the  general  experience  of  the  Fair  City 
at  Chicago  would  now  render  perceptible  even  to  the 
dullest  sense. 

VI 

There  are  other  points  on  Fifth  Avenue  nearly  as 
bad  as  this,  but  not  quite,  and  there  are  long  stretches 
of  it  which,  if  dull,  have  at  least  a  handsome  uniform- 
ity. I  have  said  already  that  it  is  still,  upon  the  whole, 

197 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

the  best  of  the  avenues,  in  the  sense  of  being  the  abode 
of  the  best  —  that  is,  the  richest  —  people ;  we  Amer- 
icans habitually  use  best  in  this  sense.  Madison  Ave- 
nue stretches  northwest  farther  than  the  eye  can  reach, 
an  interminable  perspective  of  brown-stone  dwellings, 
as  yet  little  invaded  by  business.  Lexington  Avenue  is 
of  the  same  character,  but  of  a  humbler  sort.  On 
Second  Avenue,  down-town,  there  are  large  old  man- 
sions of  the  time  when  Fifth  Avenue  was  still  the 
home  of  the  parvenus ;  and  at  different  points  on  such 
other  avenues  as  are  spared  by  the  elevated  roads  there 
are  blocks  of  decent  and  comfortable  dwellings;  but 
for  the  most  part  they  are  wholly  given  up  to  shops. 
Of  course,  these  reiterate  with  the  insane  wastefulness 
of  our  system  the  same  business,  the  same  enterprise, 
a  thousand  times. 

One  hears  a  good  deal  about  the  vast  emporiums 
which  are  gathering  the  retail  trade  into  themselves, 
and  devastating  the  minor  commerce,  but  there  are 
perhaps  a  score  of  these  at  most  in  New  York;  and 
on  the  shabbier  avenues  and  cross-streets  there  are  at 
least  a  hundred  miles  of  little  shops,  where  an  immense 
population  of  little  dealers  levy  tribute  on  the  public 
through  the  profit  they  live  by.  Until  you  actually 
see  this,  you  can  hardly  conceive  of  such  a  multitude 
of  people  taken  away  from  productive  labor  and  solely 
devoted  to  marketing  the  things  made  by  people  who 
are  overworked  in  making  them. 

Yet  I  prefer  the  smaller  shops,  where  I  can  enter 
into  some  human  relation  with  the  merchant,  if  it  is 
only  for  the  moment.  I  have  already  tried  to  give  some 
notion  of  the  multitude  of  these ;  and  I  must  say  now 
that  they  add  much  in  their  infinite  number  and  va- 
riety to  such  effect  of  gayety  as  the  city  has.  They 

are  especially  attractive  at  night,  when  their  brilliant 

198 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

lamps,  with  the  shadows  they  cast,  unite  to  an  effect 
of  gayety  which  the  day  will  not  allow. 

The  great  stores  contribute  nothing  to  this,  for  they 
all  close  at  six  o'clock  in  the  evening.  On  the  other 
hand,  they  do  not  mar  such  poor  beauty  as  the  place 
has  with  the  superfluity  of  signs  that  the  minor  traffic 
renders  itself  so  offensive  with.  One  sign,  rather  sim- 
ple and  unostentatious,  suffices  for  a  large  store;  a  lit- 
tle store  will  want  half  a  dozen,  and  will  have  them 
painted  and  hung  all  over  iits  facade,  and  stood  about 
in  front  of  it  as  obtrusively  as  the  police  will  permit. 
The  effect  is  bizarre  and  grotesque  beyond  expression. 
If  one  thing  in  the  business  streets  makes  New  York 
more  hideous  than  another  it  is  the  signs,  with  their 
discordant  colors,  their  infinite  variety  of  tasteless 
shapes.  If  by  chance  there  is  any  architectural  beau- 
ty in  a  business  edifice,  it  is  spoiled,  insulted,  out- 
raged by  these  huckstering  appeals;  while  the  prevail- 
ing unsightliness  is  emphasized  and  heightened  by 
them.  A  vast,  hulking,  bare  brick  wall,  rising  six 
or  seven  stories  above  the  neighboring  buildings,  one 
would  think  bad  enough  in  all  conscience:  how,  then, 
shall  I  give  any  notion  of  the  horror  it  becomes 
when  its  unlovely  space  is  blocked  out  in  a  ground  of 
white  with  a  sign  painted  on  it  in  black  letters  ten 
feet  high  ? 

The  signs  that  deface  the  chief  of  our  cities  seem 
trying  to  shout  and  shriek  each  other  down,  wherever 
one  turns;  they  deface  the  fronts  and  sides  and  tops 
of  the  edifices;  in  all  the  approaches  to  the  metropolis 
they  stretch  on  long  extents  of  fencing  in  the  vacant 
suburban  lands  and  cover  the  roofs  and  sides  of  the 
barns.  The  darkness  does  not  shield  you  from  them, 
and  by  night  the  very  sky  is  starred  with  the  electric 
bulbs  that  spell  out,  on  the  roofs  of  the  lofty  build- 

199 


IMPRESSIONS  AND  EXPERIENCES 

ings,  the  frantic  announcement  of  this  or  that  business 
enterprise. 

The  strangest  part  of  all  this  is,  no  one  finds  it  of- 
fensive, or  at  least  no  one  says  that  it  is  offensive.  It 
is,  indeed,  a  necessary  phase  of  the  economic  warfare 
in  which  our  people  live,  for  the  most  as  unconsciously 
as  people  lived  in  feudal  cities,  while  the  nobles  fought 
out  their  private  quarrels  in  the  midst  of  them.  No 
one  dares  relax  his  vigilance  or  his  activity  in  the  com- 
mercial strife,  and  in  the  absence  of  any  public  opinion, 
or  any  public  sentiment  concerning  them,  it  seems  as 
if  the  signs  might  eventually  hide  the  city.  That  would 
not  be  so  bad  if  something  could  then  be  done  to  hide 
the  signs. 


VII 


Nothing  seems  so  characteristic  of  this  city,  after 
its  architectural  shapelessness,  as  the  eating  and  drink- 
ing constantly  going  on  in  the  restaurants  and  hotels, 
of  every  quality,  and  the  innumerable  saloons.  There 
may  not  be  really  more  of  these  in  New  York,  in  pro- 
portion to  the  population,  than  in  other  great  cities, 
but  apparently  there  are  more;  for  in  this,  as  in  all 
her  other  characteristics,  New  York  is  very  open;  her 
virtues  and  her  vices,  her  luxury  and  her  misery,  are 
in  plain  sight ;  and  a  famishing  man  must  suffer  pecul- 
iarly here  from  the  spectacle  of  people  everywhere  at 
sumptuous  tables.  Many  of  the  finest  hotels,  if  not 
most  of  them,  have  their  dining-rooms  on  the  level  of 
the  street,  and  the  windows,  whether  curtained  or  un- 
curtained, reveal  the  continual  riot  within.  I  confess 
that  the  effect  upon  some  hungry  passer  is  always  pres- 
ent to  my  imagination;  but  the  New-Yorkers  are  so 

200 


NEW    YOKK    STREETS 

used  to  the  perpetual  encounter  of  famine  and  of  surfeit 
that  they  do  not  seem  to  mind  it. 

There  is  scarcely  a  block  on  any  of  the  poorer  ave- 
nues which  has  not  its  liquor-store,  and  generally  there 
are  two;  wherever  a  street  crosses  them  there  is  a  sa- 
loon on  at  least  one  of  the  corners;  sometimes  on  two, 
sometimes  on  three,  sometimes,  even,  on  all  four.  I 
had  the  curiosity  to  count  the  saloons  on  Sixth  Ave- 
nue, between  the  Park  and  the  point  down-town  where 
the  avenue  properly  ends.  In  a  stretch  of  some  two 
miles  I  counted  ninety  of"  them,  besides  the  eating- 
houses  where  you  can  buy  drink  with  your  meat;  and 
this  avenue  is  probably  far  less  infested  with  the  traf- 
fic than  some  others. 

You  may,  therefore,  safely  suppose  that,  out  of  the 
hundred  miles  of  shops,  there  are  ten  or  fifteen  or 
twenty  miles  of  saloons.  They  have  the  best  places  on 
the  avenues,  and  on  the  whole  they  make  the  hand- 
somest show.  They  all  have  a  cheerful  and  inviting 
look,  and  if  you  step  within,  you  find  them  cosey,  quiet, 
and,  for  New  York,  clean.  There  are  commonly  tables 
set  about  in  them,  where  their  frequenters  can  take 
their  beer  or  whiskey  at  their  ease,  and  eat  the  free 
lunch  which  is  often  given  in  them;  in  a  rear  room 
you  see  a  billiard-table.  In  fact,  they  form  the  poor 
man's  club-house,  and  if  he  might  resort  to  them  with 
his  family,  and  be  in  the  control  of  the  State  as  to  the 
amount  he  should  spend  and  drink  there,  I  could  not 
think  them  without  their  rightful  place  in  an  economy 
which  saps  the  vital  forces  of  the  laborer  with  over- 
work, or  keeps  him  in  a  fever  of  hope  or  a  fever  of 
despair  as  to  the  chances  of  getting  or  not  getting  work 
when  he  has  lost  it.  If  you  suggested  this  to  the  average 
American,  however,  he  would  be  horror  -  struck.  He 

would  tell  you  that  what  you  proposed  was  little  bet- 

201 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

ter  than  anarchy;  that  in  a  free  country  you  must  al- 
ways leave  private  persons  free  to  debauch  men's  souls 
and  bodies  with  drink,  and  make  money  out  of  their 
ruin ;  that  anything  else  was  contrary  to  human  nature, 
and  an  invasion  of  the  sacred  rights  of  the  individual. 
Here  in  New  York,  this  valuable  principle  is  so  scrupu- 
lously respected  that  the  saloon  controls  the  municipal- 
ity, and  the  New- Yorkers  think  this  is  much  better 
than  for  the  municipality  to  control  the  saloon.  It  is 
from  the  saloon  that  their  political  bosses  rise  to  power ; 
it  is  in  the  saloon  that  all  the  election  frauds  are 
planned  and  fostered ;  and  it  would  be  infinitely  comic, 
if  it  were  not  so  pathetic,  to  read  the  solemn  homilies 
on  these  abuses  in  the  journals  which  hold  by  the  good 
old  American  doctrine  of  private  trade  in  drink  as  one 
of  the  bulwarks  of  the  Constitution. 


VIII 

Without  the  saloon  there  would  be  far  less  poverty 
than  there  is,  but  poverty  is  a  good  old  American  insti- 
tution, too;  there  would  inevitably  be  less  inequality, 
but  inequality  is  as  dear  to  the  American  heart  as  lib- 
erty itself.  In  New  York  the  inequality  has  that  effect 
upon  the  architecture  which  I  have  tried  to  give  some 
notion  of;  but,  in  fact,  it  deforms  life  at  every  turn, 
and  in  nothing  more  than  in  the  dress  of  the  people, 
high  and  low.  New  York  is,  on  the  whole,  without 
doubt,  the  best-dressed  community  in  America,  or  at 
least  there  is  a  certain  number  of  people  here  more 
expensively  and  scrupulously  attired  than  you  will  find 
anywhere  else  in  the  country.  The  rich  copy  the  fash- 
ions set  for  them  in  Paris  or  in  London,  and  then  the 
less  rich,  and  the  still  less  rich',  down  to  the  poor,  fol- 

202 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

low  them  as  they  can,  until  you  arrive  at  the  very  poor- 
est, who  wear  the  cast  -  off  and  tattered  fashions  of 
former  years  and  masquerade  in  a  burlesque  of  the  fort- 
unate that  never  fails  to  shock  and  grieve  me.  They 
must  all  somehow  be  clothed;  the  climate  and  the  cus- 
tom require  it ;  but  sometimes  I  think  their  nakedness 
would  be  less  offensive;  and  when  I  meet  a  wretched 
man,  with  his  coat  out  at  the  elbows,  or  split  up  the 
back,  in  broken  shoes,  battered  hat,  and  frayed  trou- 
sers, or  some  old  woman  or  young  girl  in  a  worn-out, 
second-hand  gown  and  bonnet,  tattered  and  threadbare 
and  foul,  I  think  that  if  I  were  a  believer  in  it  I  would 
uncover  my  head  to  them  and  ask  their  forgiveness  for 
the  system  that  condemns  some  one  always  to  such  hu- 
miliation as  theirs. 

We  say  such  people  are  not  humiliated,  that  they 
do  not  mind  it,  that  they  are  used  to  it;  but  if  we 
ever  look  these  people  in  the  eye,  and  see  the  shrink- 
ing, averted  glance  of  their  shame  and  tortured  pride, 
we  must  know  that  what  we  say  is  a  cruel  lie.  At  any 
rate,  the  presence  of  these  outcasts  must  spoil  the 
beauty  of  any  dress  near  them,  and  there  is  always  so 
much  more  penury  than  affluence  that  the  sight  of  the 
crowd  in  the  ^ew  York  streets  must  give  more  pain 
than  pleasure.  The  other  day  on  Fifth  Avenue  it  did 
not  console  me  to  meet  a  young  and  lovely  girl,  exqui- 
sitely dressed  in  the  last  effect  of  Paris,  after  I  had  just 
parted  from  a  young  fellow  who  had  begged  me  to 
give  him  a  little  money  to  get  something  to  eat,  for  he 
had  been  looking  for  work  a  week  and  had  got  noth- 
ing. I  suppose  I  ought  to  have  doubted  his  word,  he 
was  so  decently  clad,  but  I  had  a  present  vision  of  him 
in  rags,  and  I  gave  to  the  frowzy  tramp  he  must  soon 
become. 

Of  course,  this  social  contrast  was  extreme,  like  some 

203 


IMPRESSIONS    AND    EXPERIENCES 

of  those  architectural  contrasts  I  have  been  noting, 
but  it  was  by  no  means  exceptional,  as  those  were  not. 
In  fact,  I  do  not  know  but  I  may  say  that  it  was  char- 
acteristic of  the  place,  though  you  might  say  that  the 
prevalent  American  slovenliness  was  also  characteristic 
of  the  New  York  street  crowds ;  I  mean  the  slovenliness 
of  the  men — the  women,  of  whatever  order  they  are, 
are  always  as  much  dandies  as  they  can  be.  But 
most  American  men  are  too  busy  to  look  much  after 
their  dress,  and  when  they  are  very  well-to-do  they 
care  very  little  for  it.  You  see  few  men  dressed  in 
New  York  with  the  distinction  of  the  better  class  of 
Londoners,  and,  when  you  do  meet  them,  they  have  the 
air  of  playing  a  part,  as,  in  fact,  they  are:  they  are 
playing  the  part  of  men  of  leisure  in  a  nation  of  men 
whose  reality  is  constant  work,  whether  they  work  for 
bread  or  whether  they  work  for  money,  and  who,  when 
they  are  at  work,  outdo  the  world,  but  sink,  when  they 
are  at  leisure,  into  something  third-rate  and  fourth- 
rate.  The  commonness  of  effect  in  the  street  crowds 
is  not  absent  from  Fifth  Avenue  or  from  Madison 
Avenue  any  more  than  it  is  from  First  Avenue  or 
Tenth  Avenue ;  and  the  tide  of  wealth  and  fashion  that 
rolls  up  and  down  the  better  avenues  in  the  splendid 
carriages  makes  the  shabbiness  of  the  foot-passenger, 
when  he  is  shabby,  as  he  often  is,  the  more  apparent. 
On  the  far  east  side,  and  on  the  far  west  side,  the 
horse-cars,  which  form  the  only  means  of  transit,  have 
got  the  dirt  and  grime  of  the  streets  and  the  dwellings 
on  them  and  in  them,  and  there  is  one  tone  of  foulness 
in  the  passengers  and  the  vehicles.  I  do  not  wish  to 
speak  other  than  tenderly  of  the  poor,  but  it  is  useless 
to  pretend  that  they  are  other  than  offensive  in  aspect, 
and  I  have  to  take  my  sympathy  in  both  hands  when 
I  try  to  bestow  it  upon  them.  Neither  they  nor  the 

204 


NEW    YORK    STREETS 

quarter  they  live  in  has  any  palliating  quaintness ;  and 
the  soul,  starved  of  beauty,  will  seek  in  vain  to  feed 
itself  with  the  husks  of  picturesqueness  in  their  aspect. 


IX 


As  I  have  said  before,  the  shabby  avenues  have  a 
picturesqueness  of  their  own,  but  it  is  a  repulsive  pict- 
uresqueness, as  I  have  already  suggested,  except  at  a 
distance.  There  are  some  differences  of  level  on  the 
avenues  near  the  rivers  that  give  them  an  advantage  of 
the  more  central  avenues,  and  there  is  now  and  then 
a  break  of  their  line  by  the  water  which  is  always 
good.  I  have  noticed  this  particularly  on  the  eastern 
side  of  the  city,  which  is  also  the  older  part,  and  which 
has  been  less  subject  to  the  changes  perpetually  going 
on  elsewhere,  so  that  First  Avenue  has  really  a  finer 
sky-line,  in  many  parts,  than  most  parts  of  Fifth  Ave- 
nue. There  are  certain  bits,  as  the  artists  say,  in  the 
old  quarters  of  the  town  once  forming  Greenwich  vil- 
lage which,  when  I  think  of  them,  make  me  almost 
wish  to  take  back  what  I  have  said  of  the  absence  even 
of  quaintness  in  New  York.  If  I  recall  the  aspect  of 
Mulberry  Bend  and  Elizabeth  Street,  on  a  mild  after- 
noon, when  their  Italian  denizens  are  all  either  on 
the  pavement  or  have  their  heads  poked  out  of  the 
windows,  I  am  still  more  in  doubt  of  my  own  words. 
But  I  am  sure,  at  least,  that  there  is  no  kindliness  in 
the  quaintness,  such  as  you  are  said  to  find  in  Euro- 
pean cities.  It  has  undergone  the  same  sort  of  malign 
change  here  that  has  transformed  tHe  Italians  from 
the  friendly  folk  they  are  at  home  to  the  surly  race 
they  mostly  show  themselves  here:  shrewd  for  their 
advancement  in  the  material  things,  which  seem  the 

205 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  EXPEKIENCES 

only  good  things  to  the  Americanized  aliens  of  all 
races,  and  fierce  for  their  full  share  of  the  political  pot- 
tage. The  Italians  have  a  whole  region  of  the  city  to 
themselves,  and  they  might  feel  at  home  in  it  if  the 
filthiness  of  their  native  environment  could  repatriate 
them. 

As  you  pass  through  these  streets  there  is  much  to 
appeal  to  your  pity  in  the  squalid  aspect  of  the  people 
and  the  place,  but  nothing  to  take  your  fancy;  and 
perhaps  this  is  best,  for  I  think  that  there  is  nothing 
more  infernal  than  the  juggle  that  transmutes  for  the 
tenderest  -  hearted  people  the  misery  of  their  fellows 
into  something  comic  or  poetic.  Only  very  rarely 
have  I  got  any  relief  from  the  sheer  distress  which, 
the  prevalent  poverty  gives;  and  perhaps  the  reader 
will  not  be  able  to  understand  how  I  could  find  this 
in  the  sight  of  some  chickens  going  to  roost  on  a  row 
of  carts  drawn  up  by  the  street-side,  near  a  little  hovel 
where  some  old  people  lived  in  a  temporary  respite 
from  the  building  about  them;  or  from  a  cottage  in 
outlying  suburban  fields,  with  a  tar-roofed  shanty  for 
a  stable,  and  an  old  horse  cropping  the  pasturage  of 
the  enclosure,  with  a  brood  of  turkeys  at  his  heels. 

But  in  ISTew  York  you  come  to  be  glad  of  anything 
that  will  suggest  a  sweeter  and  a  gentler  life  than  that 
which  you  mostly  see.  The  life  of  the  poor  here  seem- 
ed to  me  symbolized  in  a  waste  and  ruined  field  that 
I  came  upon  the  other  day  in  one  of  the  westward 
avenues,  which  had  once  been  the  grounds  about  a 
pleasant  home.  Till  I  saw  this  I  did  not  think  any 
piece  of  our  mother  earth  could  have  been  made  to  look 
so  brutal  and  desolate  amidst  the  habitations  of  men. 
But  every  spear  of  grass  had  been  torn  from  it;  the 
hardened  and  barren  soil  wras  furrowed  like  a  haggard 
face,  and  it  was  all  strewn  with  clubs  and  stones,  as  if 

206 


NEW    YOKK    STREETS 

it  had  been  a  savage  battle-ground.  A  few  trees  stood 
aloof  from  the  borders  next  the  streets,  where  some 
courses  of  an  ancient  stone  wall  rose  in  places  above 
the  pavement.  I  found  the  sight  of  it  actually  de- 
praving; it  made  me  feel  ruffianly,  and  I  mused  upon 
it  in  helpless  wonder  as  to  the  influence  its  ugliness 
must  have  had  amidst  the  structural  ugliness  all  about 
it,  if  some  wretch  had  turned  to  it  in  hopes  of  respite. 
But  probably  none  ever  does.  Probably  the  people 
on  the  shabby  streets  and  avenues  are  no  more  sensi- 
ble of  their  hideousness  than  the  people  in  the  finer 
streets  and  avenues  are  aware  of  their  dulness  or  their 
frantic  disproportion.  I  have  never  heard  a  New- 
Yorker  speak  of  these  things,  and  I  have  no  doubt  that 
if  my  words  could  come  to  the  eyes  of  the  average  New- 
Yorker  he  would  be  honestly  surprised  that  any  one 
should  find  his  city  so  ugly  as  it  is.  As  for  that  first 
lesson  of  civilization  which  my  words  implicate,  a  civic 
control  of  the  private  architecture  of  the  place,  he 
would  shrink  from  it  with  about  as  much  horror  as 
from  civic  control  of  the  liquor  trade.  If  he  did  not, 
he  would  still  be  unable  to  understand  how  the  in- 
dividual liberty  that  suffers  a  man  to  build  offensively 
to  his  neighbor  or  to  the  public  at  large  is  not  liberty, 
but  is  a  barbarous  tyranny,  which  puts  an  end  instantly 
to  beauty,  and  extinguishes  the  common  and  the  per- 
sonal rights  of  every  one  who  lives  near  the  offender 
or  passes  by  his  edifice.  We  Americans  are  yet  so  far 
lost  in  the  dark  ages  as  to  suppose  that  there  is  freedom 
where  the  caprice  of  one  citizen  can  interfere  with  the 
comfort  or  pleasure  of  the  rest. 


THE    END 


THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  SANTA  CRUZ 


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Series  2373 


UC-SANTA   CHOZ 


2106  00568  1934 


